The GameStop Stock Cult (ft. Folding Ideas)

Robert sits down with YouTuber and investigator Dan Olson to talk about his research into the cult that developed around the GameStop Stock shorting movement of 2021.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Ah, welcome back to behind Wait no, sorry, it could
happen here.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
You know.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
We'll keep that in so that our audience, who I
know is deeply tied to the myth of my own perfection,
knows that I too, air speaking of perfect creatures who
have never made a mistake. Our guest today is Dan Olsen. Hello, Welcome,
Hi Dan.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
How you doing. I'm doing well, not making.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Mistakes, exactly exactly that you are the Buddha I met
on the road, and I'm going to say hello, teach
me how to be flawless.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
So first, have you heard of gold? Yes?

Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yes, I was about to talk about gold the perfect
investment Dan.

Speaker 3 (00:53):
Perfect investment vehicle never fails.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
So Dan, you are a YouTuber and investigator, one of
my favorite researchers. We had you on recently to talk
well a couple of months ago a donuple time flat
circle etcheda but we had you wanted to talk about
your work reporting on the NFT bubble bursting and on

(01:17):
the metaverse bubble bursting, and more recently, you just published
a two and a half hour documentary investigation into the
game stop stock cult, which is a lot of people
are aware of. The first part of this, which is
that in January twenty twenty one, a bunch of folks
started like buying you via some weird Reddit movement started

(01:41):
buying huge amounts of game Stop stock, which, in a
period of pretty exaggerated decline, caused it to briefly surge
in value to absurd levels.

Speaker 3 (01:53):
And I think that's where.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
Most people kind of and then, you know, eventually it
fell apart, and I think that's where most people kind
of stopped paying attention.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Yeah, they they remember that week where it was like
in the news, and then they just kind of assumed
like that was it.

Speaker 1 (02:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
So yeah, it's it's been a It's an interesting and
weird ride because the evolution into like cult like behavior
was it was a very strange journey. It happened surprisingly rapidly,
but also not that surprisingly. Like once you fully unpack it,

(02:30):
you know, you have this internet movement that is very
nebulous in its origins or not in its origins, sorry,
the origins are very straightforward, like Wall Street Bets is
a gambling sub that had like it self describes as
if four chan found a Bloomberg terminal, So sure, you

(02:52):
know it's it's crass it's irony poisoned. You can get
just as much social clout or losing thousands of dollars
as you can for winning thousands of dollars. In fact,
there's an argument that there's more clout for lost porn
than there is for like actually posting big games. Obviously,

(03:16):
like not like the healthiest or most wholesome community you
could imagine. But you know, out of that plus COVID madness,
plus stimulus checks and just general nihilism arose this kind

(03:39):
of Frankenstein short squeeze play on game Stop that weirdly
never actually happened, because the play just sort of turned
into its its own self fulfilling thing that enough people
believed in the idea of this short squeeze play that

(04:01):
they just kept piling in and piling in, and suddenly,
like the short squeeze doesn't actually matter at all because
there's enough critical mass flooding in that you just get
this massive pump anyway, which convinces people that, oh, the
squeeze is going on. Because in the moment you don't
actually know like what mechanisms are driving the price movement.
You just see number going up, and so more people

(04:24):
kept piling in piling in, piling in. I got a
phone call from, you know, from a friend of mine
who's like, hey, have you heard about the GameStop stuff?
And I'm like, yes, I heard about it two days ago.
So if you heard about it today, it's it's way
too late. Do not. It's over. It's over. And sure enough,
like I went back and reviewed our text messages and like,

(04:44):
and if he had bought, he would have been a
just massive bag holder. Like it it plummeted, you know,
hours later.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
And like for people who are not finance people, which
I certainly am not. This is like if you watched
The Big Short that's kind of the tech I mean
number one, that movie is seen as a blueprint by
a lot of these guys. Obviously there's folks, knowledgeable financial
folks who have critiques of that movie, but it is
it is accepted as like almost kind of like a

(05:12):
sacred text within the game Stop Stop ye.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
And and it's weird because like they're the game stop enemy,
the the the ape. Okay, well i'll just use their lexicon.
We'll go over it real quick. They call themselves apes
for reasons that are not worth explaining. Their enemy are
short sellers. But short sellers are like doctor Burry short

(05:40):
sold the housing market, and Burry is that's Christian Bales character, right,
Christian Bales character. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like all of the
main characters in that movie short sold the housing market
like that. That was their play. That was the big
short was. They're like, look, there's this bubble, We're going
to short sell it. Then when the price goes down,

(06:02):
we close our positions out and keep a tremendous amount
of money.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
And I should we should go just because when I
watched this with a friend, they did not know what
short selling was. It's not I think, a normal It's
not a thing normal people where it will ever be
in a position to do. The basic idea and this
is all occurring with like stocks and commodities, But the
basic idea is you make an agreement with somebody to
get basically a loan of a bunch of shares in something, right,

(06:34):
and with the understanding that you will give those back
at a point in the future. And then you take
those and you immediately sell them for their their present value, right,
and your hope, your play at like goal is that
the value of that drops and then you are able
to buy back an equivalent amount to repay the loan

(06:55):
and have made a profit based on the gap between
those two numbers.

Speaker 3 (06:58):
Right, that's the idea. That's that's the that's the idea.
You you can as an individual like do this. You can,
you can take out a short position with your broker,
you can. You can do it through derivatives like puts.
I wouldn't recommend it.

Speaker 2 (07:14):
Yeah, it's it's kind of normal people's stock stuff.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
Yeah, it's not normal people's stock stuff. Like you're there's
nothing legally barring you from doing it, but it it
really is kind of this like advanced play. You got
to know what's going on, especially because like a thing
that a lot of people in the description sort of
skip over, is it. Well, you're borrowing it. You know,
you're borrowing a thing, and thus there's the expectation that
you'll pay some kind of like you know, borrower's fee

(07:43):
akin to a kin to interest on like the value
of the thing that you've borrowed. Uh, but like it's
it's not interest on you know, like a housing loan
where the interest and like where your payments all are
geared towards paying off the loan. It's just kind of like,
all right, you ow me five bucks every single month
forever as long as you're holding this. And so you know,

(08:06):
if you're not paying attention, like you need to be
very actively managing these kinds of positions otherwise like your
borrowing fees will just eat up all of your profit.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, And it's the kind of thing where like today
most of those kind of kinds of trades aren't even
really made by people directly. They're made by massive banks
of computers and algorithms and shit kind of yeah. Yeah, yeah, Anyway,
I think that's that's enough background back to the kind
of cult aspect of it, which is I think much
more relevant for what we're talking about here. One of

(08:38):
the points you made early on that I found really
interesting is is that a significant amount of the initial
game stock game stops I'm going to keep doing that
hype was driven by influencers, right, and that there's evidence
based on kind of the US government's analysis of this
that got published that like regulators are paying additional tension

(09:00):
increasing attention to the influences that or to the impact
that influencers can have here because there's this concern that,
especially working in groups, there's like an ability for people
like this to disrupt the economy to a significant extent,
to a way that would affect like normal people.

Speaker 3 (09:17):
Yeah, so one of the weird kind of so pump
and dumps have existed forever, right. The thing was is
that so the the memes stock run up, it wasn't
just GameStop. It was about like fifteen twenty, like in
January twenty twenty one, like so late twenty twenty, early
twenty twenty one. It was about fifteen twenty different companies,

(09:38):
you know, Nokia, BlackBerry, bed Bath and Beyond, like you know,
just kind of a bunch of over the hill companies
that were all sort of part of this this wave.
And the issue was that in the game stop price
run up. So the price went from at the end

(09:59):
of tw twenty twenty as everybody like as sort of
the meme wave like begins, and particularly once Ryan Cohen,
billionaire Chewy founder Chewy the Cat treat or dog online
dog food sales. Yeah. Yeah, when he buys in like
that kind of like puts the stamp of approval on
the whole thing. So it goes from like four and

(10:20):
a half dollars up to nineteen something. And then at
the end of January, it goes from nineteen twenty dollars
up to four hundred and eighty, and so in that
spread the short sales, so there was short interest in
game Stop. There was, in fact a reckless amount of
short interest in game Stop, but the price increase was

(10:43):
so huge, the volume of participation was so big, so
many people were jumping on this that the short interest
closing their position. The actual like short squeeze portion of
all of this is only like ten percent of the
price movement. All the rest of it is just people

(11:06):
fomoing in on like this thing that they heard about
through their cousin.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
I think another thing that's kind of interesting to me
is like, as this thing has evolved, you know, you
mentioned that the actual price got up to like close
around five hundred dollars by the time this thing kind
of transitions into being this millenarian kind of apocalypse cult, right,
like not you know, nukes and stuff, end of days
apocalypse generally, but like the entire economy is going to come.

(11:43):
The belief that kind of has evolved broadly and that
obviously there's different kind of factions is but is that
like there is going to come a point where like
the price of game Stop stock will increase to such
an insane some people say hundreds of millions, billions of
dollars per share, that it effectively allows all of these
apes who have bought shares to hold the entire world

(12:06):
economy hostage until they have there but increasingly arcane demands met. Right, Yeah,
that is the belief, and that is the belief.

Speaker 3 (12:14):
So so out of that, like so okay, So the
short's closing was only like about ten percent of the
of the total movement. So that leads to the conclusion
that you know that the events of January twenty twenty
one weren't a short squeeze, which is actually kind of true,

(12:36):
Like it wasn't it wasn't purely a short squeeze. It
was actually very little of it was a short squeeze.
But because it wasn't a short squeeze, like that term
then allows the creative individual to fill in the gap
and just say that it's like just say this, like, oh,
the short squeeze never happened. Therefore it's still on the

(12:59):
table the shorts like it the end. You know, it
hasn't happened yet, therefore it can still potentially happen. And
in fact, if we just like look at the trend line,
like I bet since it hasn't happened, since it didn't happen,
and the position that they held in December was so reckless,
it's only gotten worse since, which means that they're getting

(13:22):
which means that these short sellers must be getting desperate,
which means they're going to be willing to engage in
whatever level of depraved criminal activity is necessary to protect themselves. Therefore,
it's just getting more and more and more and more extreme. Therefore,
when this finally goes off, it's not just going to
be like it's not just going to be a five
hundred dollars price point. It's going to be a nuclear

(13:44):
explosion that's going to topple the entire economy. Yeah, And
that's this like train of logic and what they and
it all comes from that, just like missing the fact
that it's like, oh, it wasn't a short squeeze because
it was mostly fomo. The short squeeze was buried under
a mountain of of fomo. Yeah, but so it wasn't

(14:04):
a short scool. It's like, yeah, it's all just like
based in these like word games of like, ah, you
said it was you know that the dumb and dumber.
You know, it's like, what are the odds a one
in million, So you're saying there's a chance it's well, yeah,
that's not what I'm say.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
It's interesting because of the impossibility of the things they're
actually hoping for, but also their fundamental belief that like
it's inevitable, in part because you know, this is this
is not wildly different from the psychology of like needing
to believe in uh that you are going to paradise
in the after.

Speaker 3 (14:36):
Yeah, hallmarks of millennarians.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, yeah, because of that, what you get is a
lot of people who think that they are thinking scientifically,
but what they're doing is taking an endpoint. And the
endpoint is that you know this specific you know, the
these hedge funds or whatever are are evil and you know,
illegally bribing or whatever the government to stop us from succeeding,

(14:57):
or there's this other conspiracy. You're starting with this endpoint
and then working backwards and like finding ways to explain
the things that have happened within that framework.

Speaker 3 (15:07):
Like the things that would need to be true in
order for the yeah thing.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
To happen, like the thing that like Citadel must have
ordered robin Hood to stop letting people buy and share
game stock stocks rather than like, you know what what
actually happened, which is that robin Hood simply like could
not exist if they allowed this to continue. Yeah, and
you know, legally, I don't believe there's anything that was

(15:31):
stopping them from doing that. It's medieval peasant brain kind
of stuff, is what I initially like. That's how when
I was watching your documentary, I was like, oh, it's
this you know, this need to find this kind of
like magical answer to the problem. And then I like
interrogated that conclusion and was like, well, no, it's not.
This is just the way people's brains work, right, Yeah,

(15:52):
like we're pattern making. This isn't medieval peasant shit. They're
no dumber than we are. Like, yeah, that's what this shows.

Speaker 3 (15:59):
Yeah. And one of the things that I love just
kind of on that is that, like you if you
had a time machine and you went back one hundred
thousand years and and found a bunch of you know,
homoliteral literal cavemen, yeah, actual apes more or less, you know,
like hundred thousand years ago. That's that's modern humans. Like
genetically that's genetically modern humans. You could just like implant

(16:23):
yourself in their tribe and teach them calculus and you know.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yeah suh that it's like like we're like things don't
change it.

Speaker 3 (16:34):
It's like it's like, yeah, no, we've been We've been
doing this ever since we were you know, this pattern
seeking doesn't change. It's almost like it is basically endemic
to the human psyche. There's a really good question that
that I've gotten in response to this is just like
is this just secular religion? Like is this just are

(16:55):
we just like wired to need faith in some shape
or form and if that is not provided by some institution,
we will just invent it. And it's like I don't
have the answer to that, but sign's point to yes. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
Now, So I wanted to talk a little bit about
one of the other things that you brought up that
I thought was interesting is the way you've got this
this cast of and these are you know, the influencers.
These are the people who make a lot of these
like arcane videos or put out these publish these prospectuses
with there are dozens or hundreds of pages laying out

(17:37):
you know, the arcana of how these different sort of
anticipated apocalyptic financial moves are going to go out, right, Yeah,
a lot of these people the belief is that that
I think is accurate at least this is what I
got from your documentary. Maybe I was interpreting you wrong,
is that most of these or many of these people
are not believers. They're manipulating a group of people because

(17:59):
there's in it. And one of the tactics that you
see used a lot is kind of faux humility. Right,
I'm just a dumb ape. You shouldn't trust me. I'm
not qualified to give financial advice. But here's the secret
history of the universe. To invest your money here now.

Speaker 3 (18:14):
So, I mean you've seen this a lot with Yeah,
with various like cult leaders and pseudo cult leaders and
just general like grift fluencers. You know, there's always this
question of like how much of their own how much
of their own hype do they believe? How much did
they believe when they started, how much did they eventually
just like convince themselves of as people you know, follow them,

(18:37):
And I think it's it's very much like kind of
a an individual case by case basis. Some of them
are absolutely true believers. Like from the get go, some
of them, like a lot of them are like soft believers,
you know, you know where it's like they're not hardcore
into it, you know, if you really pressed them, Like

(18:59):
it's not motivating their their daily decisions. But what they're
taking from it is like social reinforcement. That they've found
a group of people who respond to them, who like
their posts, who leave messages. It's like, oh man, this
blew my mind. I can't believe the system is like
this fragile. You know, my tits are jacked, lighting the

(19:22):
fuse on the rocket ship, buying more moon tickets, you know.
And they and they respond to that very socially, and
and and out of that sort of soup of like
reinforcing messages, it's really easy for people in those influencer
positions to just kind of like hold conflicting like hold

(19:44):
the conflicting beliefs of like, I know that this is impossible,
but also it is like fulfilling me socially to say
these things. I'll just I'll just juggle that inconsistency.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah, And the way the panics of social media, and
particularly in this case, it's the mechanics largely of Reddit.
That's not the only place this occurs, but Reddit is
certainly like the homeland. You could say, the way in
which up votes and down votes work, and the way
in which upvotes and down votes take you know, critical
content people who are trying to induce some accuracy or

(20:20):
you might even say sanity in the discussion, and that
that gets pushed down and hidden after a certain point
of time with enough down votes, as opposed to like
the stuff that is fundamentally unhinged but is like utopian
gets upvoted. It's it's the the physical, like the actual
mechanics of how the site is structured to work enforce

(20:42):
fund at a fundamental level, enforced group think consensus.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
Absolutely. Oh and I mean in the best part about it,
and we see this across like all across Reddit communities,
which is this like it is it it's the social
enforcement of truth that that people will take this social
mechanism of up votes and down votes and use it
as proof against the claim that it's like, oh, well,

(21:05):
if if your negative sentiment were true, it would have
been up voted. Yeah, because like there's this underline, there's
this kind of just like implicit belief that people will
recognize truth and will upvote truth, and thus up votes
and down votes are are an accurate filter on reality

(21:29):
which is demonstrably not true. So yeah, that's intensely at
play here because you'll see apes who will then like
reference the fact that like that, you know that. It's like,
if this insane theory were false, why did it get
so many up votes? And it's like, well, because it it.

(21:52):
It hypes you up. It makes you. People are irrational.
You got a tingly feeling in your tummy when you
read it and the person told you that you were
going to be a millionaire. Yeah, that's why.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
It's like asking why do we like magicians?

Speaker 3 (22:07):
Of course we like magicians.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
It's it looks nice, it's fun, it makes us feel
a sense of wonder.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
I want to discuss one of the terms that you
use a lot that I missed the first couple of
times because I'm not I'm not. This is not a
community I had studied. I thought you misspoke at first
when you described like someone reached achieving a financial wind
fall as wife changing money. I just thought you, like,
I do that all the time. That show it's delivererate.

Speaker 3 (22:40):
That's yes, yeah, no, no, and I was like, oh, okay,
this is a thing they say. Yeah, a lot of
people are like, I thought you misspoke. I'm like, no,
that's because I was tricking you. Like I was. I
was deliberately like very light in this term, like because
like because they use it like obviously as a as
an entendre. And I was just like okay, like I'll
just use it straight faced with no explanation three four

(23:03):
times and then finally explain it at the end and
make a lot of people angry when they realize that, like, no,
they weren't just mishearing me. Yeah. So that's one of
those things like that goes to sort of the four
Chan roots of all of this, which is, you know,
the sort of like crass irreverence slash misogyny of of

(23:27):
chan speak and just this you know, Wall Street bets
will use this kind of like celebration of making so
much money that you can afford to be misogynistic and
just like swap your wife. And and it turns out that, like,
as we know, you make a joke like that often enough,

(23:50):
you're eventually going to attract the people who are just
straight up like yeah I hate.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
My wife, Yeah I want to be able to replace
her using my using my crypto or my yeah whatever,
my game stock Stop god gains. I was wondering if
you might lay out one of the things, the parts
that was most interested in me was the whole Teddy Day,
Teddy Day, Oh boy, teddy d Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
Can you explain Teddy Day to our listeners? Okay. So
Ryan Cohen, who fancies himself an activist investor, he buys
into game Stop and gets a minority, pretty substantial holdings
that count as like a minority thing. You need to
file a bunch of paperwork with the sec that say, like,

(24:36):
you know, it's like I hold greater than ten percent
of this company. And he used that position to basically
get power inside the company itself as chairman. As of
a couple of weeks ago, he's now CEO. So so
Ryan Cohen gets heavily involved with with game Stop, and
he's like, I'm gonna turn this around because his real angs,

(24:58):
what seems to be his anger anxiety in life at
the moment, is this like sense of legacy. He doesn't
just want to be like like, oh I got lucky
with an online pet food sales thing. I'm a I'm
a real. I'm a big boy finance guy, you know,
I save dying companies. Real rich guy hobby. He puts
out a series of children's books called Teddy, named after

(25:20):
his late father.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (25:22):
And these are it's it's five books that have a
target audience of two year olds. That because you know,
when when you're rich and you want to do something
like that, you want to vanity published books. You don't
just like go to an off the shelf vanity publisher.
You make your own vanity publisher because in the scheme

(25:44):
of things like that's just not that expensive. So Amazon
has made it easier than ever, easier than ever. So
he founds this LLC, you know, air quote founds pays
the like six hundred bucks in filing fees to create
this LLC. Teddy Publishing files a whole bunch of trademarks.
You know, we're talking like a few thousand dollars all

(26:07):
in all in order to file, like in order to
just file a bunch of paperwork. And this is all
just like the scattershot stuff of like, okay, we're making
a product aimed at children. Let's file the trademark for
Teddy very broadly. And so it's going to cover like
basically children's merchandise across the board. You know, what if
we want to put what if we want to put

(26:28):
the characters on blankets or bottles or cups or plates
or party supplies or whatever. So these trademarks are just
incredibly wide ranging across just merch Yeah. But the existence
of these trademark applications and this LLC becomes the seed

(26:51):
for Teddy the Company, as this like the mechanism through
which Ryan Cohen is going to collaborate with Apes in
order to trigger MOASS. Because I guess this is the
important thing about the mythology. Apes believe Ryan Cohen is

(27:13):
on their side, that he is, he is their inside man.
He is working with them. He is as frustrated as
they are that this hasn't happened yet. But for like
arcane legal reasons, he needs to like he needs to
operate like a like a clockmaker, you know, he has
to do everything very delicately and indirectly, and like his

(27:36):
hand cannot be seen pushing on the scales. So they
think that it's like that this becomes the thing that
they view all of their all of their hopes and
dreams into his Teddy LLC. That's like this is the
thing that he's going to use as the mechanism to
do this. He's going to like buy game Stop via Teddy.

(27:58):
He's going to buy me maybe some other company via Teddy.
Teddy's going to get bought in to, like it is
going to get bought by game Stop like one way
or another. There were like hundreds of competing theories all
rooted in in this. But then back in January of

(28:19):
this year, a insanity starts in two So in both
GameStop forums and bed Bath and Beyond forums, the two
meme stocks that are linked by Ryan Cohen, they they
create this idea called Teddy Day, which is a combination

(28:43):
of a bunch of things. So Ryan Cohen tweeted several
Titanic references. James Cameron's Titanic was being re released this
past February on a day that aligned with National Teddy

(29:04):
Bear Day, and so two different communities of apes, for
completely separate reasons, latched onto this idea of Teddy Day.
It was Friday, February tenth, twenty twenty three. They latched
onto it as just this that like this is the day,

(29:27):
this is when it's all going to come together. This
is when he's going to make his big move. And
a major driving piece of evidence that they had for
Teddy Day was that in one of the Teddy books,
the kids learned to read a clock and the hands
on the clock are pointed to ten and two. So

(29:52):
Ryan Cohen left them clues in this children's book published
six months earlier, warning them that February tenth was going
to be the day that it all went down, that
that was the day of the apocalypse, that was Teddy Day.

(30:13):
And it got just like the the spread of this
got just like absolutely unhinged on the forms, like it
was all that super stunk and BBB, why we're talking
about For like a week and a half leading up
to it, the hype was like unreal. And then of
course nothing happened. You you, I don't know if you

(30:35):
noticed this, but but the US economy did not collapse
last February.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
Oh that's good. I had been I have been living
like a postal apocalyptic warlord under the assumption that it
had but all, yeah, I'll pivot now.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
Yeah. So so it's just it's one of those like
it's just such a great encapsulation of the fact that
like that. These communities, they will they will invent these
these catalyst moments, convince themselves that like, oh, here's a
date that's upcoming, and then the moment that, like the
great disappointment happens, some of them like bleed off, but

(31:11):
for the most part like it. Nothing can actually like
stop the inertia. They can just discard it. And and
they did. They you know, no one talks about Teddy
Day anymore except for the fact that like it it
had a brief Teddy Day two point zero as October

(31:31):
second was like upcoming, because you know, ah, maybe it
wasn't the tenth of February, it was the second of October,
you know. And and sure, like I'm willing to bet
that when next February rolls around, like we'll we'll get
Teddy Day three point zero. Yeah, I'm sure. It just
keeps this.

Speaker 2 (31:51):
The same thing has happened with like different kind of
Christian apocalypse cults, right where you'll have a guy pick
a day, then the day comes, and then there's always
a reason. And fundamentally, because this becomes so much of
someone's social life, because it becomes part of their emotional
support network, because it's like fundamentally, you changes the way

(32:12):
you talk, Like you learn so many new words that
make it into your diction that like it's easier to
just keep rolling the expected date ahead rather than like
acknowledge that kind of fundamental hit to your self conception
that admitting you got played would take.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
Yeah. Yeah, the guy who does so religion for breakfast, Yeah,
he picked up on the fact that, like I was
using phrases like a great disappointment in in the video,
like very deliberately, because it's like it's the it's the
same mechanism. So the great disappointment was like that's the
event that caused the Seventh day Adventist to come into

(32:50):
existence because it was like a expected date of the
apocalypse of the Second Coming, like yeah, didn't happen, And
you end up with like this then fragmentation of the aftermath.
A bunch of people just bleed off. But you end
up with like a couple different factions, ones who are like, ah, well,
the date was like the date wasn't wrong per se,

(33:12):
or like the idea wasn't wrong, just like the date
was wrong, like maybe it's off by one hundred years
or whatever. And you get other people who are like
actually it did happen. It just happened in secret, like
obviously it wasn't going to just like happen in Times Square.
It happened, like you know, the millennium is already kind
of like rolling underneath normal like normal looking society. It's

(33:35):
going on right now. It's just day to day life
hasn't changed. And that's how you know it's happening is
that nothing's changing. It's like okay, okay, cool, so completely unfalsifiable,
rad awesome, love that for you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
So one of the things that kind of related to
that I have been thinking about a lot lately is
we've got this the story that keeps, you know, popping
into the news every couple of usually a couple of
times a year, that what are called nons are are
increasing as a percentage of the population every single year,

(34:13):
which is like people who are not affiliated to any religion.
And I've seen, especially a few years ago, you know,
atheists that I knew who were kind of like more
active and like atheism is a movement really celebrating this.
I think that does like the the assumption that that

(34:34):
means that like atheism is growing more popular has been
kind of fundamentally inaccurate. I think what we're seeing and
what this this is kind of evidence of, is that
like non affiliation with an organized religion is more common
than ever. People are rejecting organized, settled religion at a
kind of unprecedented rate that's certainly undeniable. That doesn't mean

(34:56):
they're as they are still believers. And this is an example,
right right, this is people are creating. The Internet has
given created a tremendous capacity to build religions, and that's
what people are doing.

Speaker 3 (35:11):
That's what this is. Yeah, and it's like how long
lasting will it be? I mean, I don't in the
scope of in the scope of world faiths. I don't
think game stopism is is poised to stand the test
of time. I don't think we'll be seeing an ape

(35:36):
emperor any anytime soon. But but yeah, like and and
the thing is is that like you go back through
history and like you you look at like religious archaeology,
and like you start sort of breaking away from sort
of this idea of Christian hegemony as being effectively like
that It's like, okay, you know, once the Christianization of

(35:57):
Rome happened, like it was, it was then locked in
in like until you know Martin Luther, and then you
get like fragmentation into sects, but like it stays like
locked in, and it's like it's like nah, when you
start really digging into the history, it's like, this is
just this is always going on, This is always boiling

(36:18):
under the surface. You look at like Puritanism in America
through a non like through just kind of like a
human lens of like what you know about how people behave,
and you suddenly start seeing that it's like, oh, they
were just like in a constant, perpetual state of internal
fragmentation as people had different ideas about like what was

(36:42):
supposed to happen, what should happen, and just kind of
like formed you know, cliques and factions, and sometimes those
factions got big enough to split off and then they
lasted you know, ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years and then
like either folded back into the main thing or or whatever.
But this kind of like churn in in faith and

(37:04):
belief is is just it's always there. It just in
an organized, codified faith. It's a lot easier to lose
track of it, particularly from a historical perspective. It's a
lot easier to just look at like the bigger picture
and be like, ah, it was all the same, it
was homogeneous. And it turns out no, yeah, sorry, that

(37:30):
was a very no, no, no, no, there was. I
threw a lot of like very big assumptions into a
very tightly packed statement. There, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
I think that was great, And yeah, that's that's kind
of I think what I what I had to sort
of ask about, you know, just sort of this fascination
with the way in which almost anything can become a
cult these days thanks to sort of the social dynamics

(38:01):
of the different online communities and how they they reinforce
each other. Like this is kind of at the center
of almost everything that's a problem right now, one way
or the other.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Right, Yeah. I think the thing that is new and
modern really is the ability, or is the I don't
want to say ability, the phenomenon of decentralized self organizing
belief systems. You know that Like there's these a lot
of the a lot of the meme stock influencers. You know,

(38:33):
they're not leading it. They're just like nudging it. They're
not in charge of it. And if they if any
of them like tried to like really like seize the
reins that that would get them like exiled. You know,

(38:54):
any any kind of like overt power grab would be
would be antithetical to it. But so it's the it's
and it's the same thing like in QAnon, if somebody
anyone who's come out and been like I am q
listen to me, gets immediately just like just demolished by
the faithful because like it's it's antithetical to their whole

(39:15):
thing to have a really identifiable leader. And and the
fact that there is no identifiable leader, that that the
leader is mythological is useful and beneficial to the to
the organization, and those kinds of like those kinds of movements,

(39:37):
they're not unique to the modern age, but the modern
age has made them very easy to form, almost by accident.

Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah, well, Dan, this would be something for people to
continue to keep an eye on because it's not gonna stop.

Speaker 3 (39:53):
Probably I'm I'm there's gonna be some like amazing doctoral
dissertations on this subject in like ten years.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
Yes, I would, I would certainly agree with that. Well, Dan,
you want to let the people know where they can
find you.

Speaker 3 (40:10):
They can find me on YouTube. The channel name is
Folding ideas and I'm on socials, Twitter, Blue Sky, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera, as as Foldable Human excellent.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
All right, check out Dan's videos, check out his YouTube channel,
like and subscribe and check us out. But you already
have because you're here, so continue to check us out.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
It Could Happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
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