Culture Wars: From GameStop to Twitter

0:00Hi, I'm Ralph Howell and welcome to my show The Journeyman. The idea of the journeyman is to take us on that journey of knowledge and understanding right to the nexus of understanding of macro, crypto and the exponential age, where all of these themes weave together and take us into unknown and incredible places. There's going to be ups. There's going to be downs on the way. But I'm there with you together on this journey. one of the things that I've been fascinated part of my big framework of of understanding of everything around us was the dramatic shift that happened in 2008 2008 itself was the outcome of events that had gone before it but the event what I saw was this massively indebted society that blew up in 2008.

0:58And it affected everybody. Many people's lives were shattered because of it. And our understanding how economies work has changed ever since. Something about my everything code is exactly that. And I've spoken at length with people like Jordy Visser, even Dee Smith, about what this meant for the economies and society and where that's going and i think it's the end of the kind of debt-based economy and i talked with geordie if you haven't seen that interview you should watch that one about you know we're in a more equity-based culture as well as people move away from debt-based systems the rise of cryptocurrencies is part of that whole change but one of the things that d smith and i talked about is about the societal change the change that happened in 2008 was occupy wall street it was people realized that they didn't have the system didn't have their back anymore the system had let people down and the experts weren't experts and that they couldn't trust people and they were on their own Occupy Wall Street was that it was like you lied to us you don't have our backs and that realization that you're on your own spread it spread to Europe back in 2012 when the indignados in Spain, I mean, I think it was two million people marched from the provinces to the streets of Madrid to complain about what was happening.

2:20And that movement keeps spreading. It keeps spreading because people are deeply unhappy. You see, their real wages, and I think I've done the long-form interview about this with Robert Breedlove, is that people's real wages never went up. There was too many people in the labor force, the baby boomers and the millennials. The millennials got the shitty end of the stick because all the assets had gone up so much, their incomes haven't gone up significantly, so the assets are so expensive that they can't afford to get up the ladder. And that makes people angry because the American dream is not alive for them.

2:55So what do they do about it? Well, that's the topic of my next conversation. My next conversation is with a good friend of mine who's an incredible author, incredibly successful um and also you know almost all his books are made into films amazing guy and also a lovely guy but he understands the zeitgeist and the zeitgeist is of these millennials when they were stuck at home in the pandemic and being given a bit of money it's not a lot 1200 bucks but even then they weren't spending money so had money at home and they decided to yolo and the idea behind it was fuck it we need to take risk to get ahead now America was built on risk taking and I don't have a problem with it and I don't have a problem with it because the millennial cohort are also you know big investors in 401ks they do what they're told to do but there's still no way of getting to where they need to get to in life and the answer is to start investing and you need to invest in things that have the riskiest profiles, things that have unlimited upside.

4:05And to many people that's cryptocurrency, to others it's technology, or to others it's distressed companies that may offer an opportunity that they don't go bankrupt and you can make several hundred percent. And that gripped an entire nation via GameStop and Wall Street vets. And Ben wrote the book about it. And as ever, it's an amazing book. And I want to hear Ben's story of that. But even more, if you think of that spread of humans as a collective now becoming almost more powerful than states, again, something I've talked about a lot, both with Geordie, Dee Smith, and others about the rise of the digital nation state, one of the largest places that those nation states, those digital nations meet, or these digital societies meet is Twitter.

4:56And Ben has written the book about Twitter too, called Breaking Twitter. And that's just coming out now. And that'll be an incredible read about Elon's journey to buy Twitter and how it almost broke him too. Anyway, really look forward to this conversation. Ben's an amazing guy. Lots to learn, lots of fun to be had. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto, and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

5:34Ben Mesrich, fantastic to see you, my friend. Great seeing you as well. Thank you so much for having me back. Listen, for those small number of people on the planet who don't know who you are, you have one of the most ludicrous success rates of writing incredible books about zeitgeist, particularly that kind of culture around money and people. And there's a lot of really interesting kind of meta narratives that half of them end up as films. It's an extraordinary journey. So just give people just your highlights. I mean, it's completely insane that it's worked out this long in this sort of business.

6:14They haven't discovered you're a fraud yet. No, I mean, it's amazing. So I've written 25 books at this point, you know which which sounds like a lot but people really read two of them but i've had a number of them turn into movies my first success was bringing down the house about the mit blackjack team which became the movie 21 if you remember that one i sent you a photo of me watching it right right yeah that still plays on i think it's still on netflix i'm not sure but it's a great film if you especially if you go to vegas or if you gamble or if you're into cards or it's just a wonderful movie.

6:49And then my book, The Accident of Billionaires, was made into the movie The Social Network, which everybody saw, which is, you know, just I think, you know, one of the best movies ever made. You know, you have Fincher, you had Sorkin with an incredible cast. And then my book, most recent book, The Antisocial Network, was made into the movie Dumb Money, which is still in a few theaters, but will be actually available to own in next week and in a week or two. And then It will be on streaming later in the year. Great movie. I think about the whole GameStop phenomenon with an incredible cast and it's a comedy.

7:27And I wrote for the show Billions, which was a lot of fun for a couple of seasons. and my new book is Breaking Twitter about Elon and Twitter and the escapades and the misadventure that I believe has, he just didn't break Twitter, Twitter broke Elon Musk. That's what we're saying in this book that I think is different from the other narratives out there. I think it really had a major effect on who Elon is and what we think of him and I think that that's the bigger story. But anyways, I've written a lot of books about tech and young people making fortunes and Bitcoin billionaires, I think has a lot of fans in the industries that you're involved with.

8:08But, you know, I've written about aliens, I've written about biotech, I've written about just about everything, trying to sort of keep my foot in the door of culture and Hollywood. I don't know how you managed to write so fast to get all these books out, but you're like a machine. It's amazing. I've got it down to science. I write a book in about 11 weeks at this point in my career. So it's harder, you know, the writing part isn't hard for me. It's finding the story that I want to dedicate myself, that I want to dive in, that will be relevant the year later that a book comes out. I mean, you have to remember there's such a downtime in between when you write it and when it comes out that you have to pick topics that people will care about a year from now.

8:50Let's talk about how you stumbled across and thought about the dumb money story. We'll get into Elon later and all of that. But this was a really big zeitgeist moment. Talk me through all of that. How did it start for you? How did it get in your radar screen? Yeah. I mean, you have to remember this was the depths of the pandemic. It was January of 2021. We were all pretty much locked up. I was up in Vermont, you know, in a basement. Being a hypochondriac and crazy, crazy person, to me, this was like the moment of the apocalypse. and I'm watching, you know, the internet like everyone else because there's nothing else to do.

9:28And GameStop, the stock just starts going crazy. And I loved GameStop. I have a 13 year old son. We're in GameStop all the time. I'm a gamer from, you know, way back when games were like really horrible. And so for me, the idea that this company was suddenly worth the amount of like GE, it was this stunning moment. And I was blown away and I was trying to decide, whether I should be buying GameStop because it's flying upward. It was a Wednesday, I remember. And then I start getting all these emails from people who were like, you should be writing about this seems like one of your books. And I started to reach around to see who did I know in this story?

10:08Was it something that I could write about? And being a Boston guy, I did have connections to a lot of the characters in the story, writing about finance. I knew I could get to sort of the Gabe Plotkin type people, the Ken Griffin, those people, if they wouldn't talk to me, certainly people around them would. And so by Wednesday night, it was the same day that the stock was flying, I wrote a 10-page book proposal. We sent it out in Hollywood first, because that's what I do now, is I send my treatments out in Hollywood before I send it to publishers. And we had a bidding war. We had about nine studios bidding on it by Thursday.

10:46So within 24 hours, because this was the story of the moment. And to me, I really saw this as the origin of something enormous. Like there was this revolution going on and it harkened back to crypto. It harkened even before that to the social network where all these things were coming together and suddenly people, regular people were rising up in anger against Wall Street. And to me, this was a moment, a cultural moment. So anyways, by Friday, I had a movie deal, you know, midnight Friday. and then by Monday I headed out to book publishers and had a book deal. So I hadn't actually written anything yet and the story was still happening.

11:23So what was really weird, you know, if you watch the movie, I'm writing the book while the stuff that's in the movie is going on and the movie and the book kind of end on the big congressional hearing where Roaring Kitty is pulled up next to all of these Wall Street guys and that's when I finished the book. So it really kind of was a different writing experience for me but i just think it's one of those important stories that's also absurd um which is why it ended up being a comedy as a movie it also just felt like it was the perfect story for you because it kind of tied together so many of the narrative arcs that you followed you know and it the occupy wall street which was that kind of everybody realizing that they were on their own then there was the kind of optimism of well we can all build a social network and do all of this and we can all become billionaires.

12:13That whole theory of, well, we need to do something to become billionaires. And then everybody gets together. And the hero's journey is not a single person now. The hero's journey is everybody. Yeah. I mean, it really does all fall together. And also the idea that people, what happened in Web3 and crypto, is that the power is in the people, in communities, right? That value is given by the community. And I think that same sort of spirit of power to the people, you know, that Occupy Wall Street had failed. You know, it was people hanging out in a park trying to break down Wall Street that never really went anywhere.

12:51But this actually succeeded, at least for a brief moment. Main Street was more powerful than Wall Street. And so that it all does come together. And everything I've written about in the last decade really did feel like it was coming together in one moment. one glorious moment all led by this dude with a bandana on his head in his basement it kind of was just perfect if there's a simulation going on this was the simulation telling me i need to do this story i know it's yeah it's you know it's billionaires it's social networks it's everything but this story isn't dead right no both the story and the movie so unfortunately the movie came out in the middle of an acting strike which made it incredibly difficult because we're an actor-driven movie and this is a movie with a phenomenal cast, Seth Rogen, Pete Davidson, America Ferrara, Shailene Woodley, like Vincent D 'Onofrio playing Steve Cohen.

13:41So it's one of those movies that we really needed our actors out promoting, because you're competing with like Taylor Swift. You're not going to win that battle. But it will be a movie, I believe, that explodes on Netflix or where it'll eventually end up. But the movement itself, no, of course, this is really the beginning of a movement. Of course, GameStop and AMC and all the retail stocks, they came back to earth. But there's still millions and millions of people who realize now that there is power in that. And that if a million people gather together on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, that's more powerful than any bank.

14:18And it's just a matter of when is that going to bubble up again? And the other thing is, I think what we're really capturing is that there's this massive amount of anger, the feeling that the whole economy is rigged, that Wall Street is a joke, it's a casino where big players like Steve Cohen and more Ken Griffin have outsized power and are doing things in the darkness that we don't really know what they're doing. That anger needs to express itself. And I think it's going to come up again and again and again. And then we've seen it in crypto. I mean, crypto is that whole idea that markets are rigged and money is rigged and all of that is not fair.

14:56And there needs to be a way for this to become in the open and fair. And so, yeah, I think the movement is really just beginning. I really think it's a revolution that's happening slowly in all areas. It's not just happening in the economy. It's happening in politics. Not always a good thing, by the way. Revolutions are usually awful for people who are involved in that moment, but hopefully you end up somewhere better. But I do think we're seeing revolutions happening in almost every element of our lives. Yeah. And, you know, again, going back to the kind of, if you look back over the body of work that you've done is, you know, the social network or that whole idea was what enabled people to get together before we'd have to do it in the street, which was Occupy Wall Street.

15:46And then it changed. It's changed everything. I mean, Zuckerberg, and I credit Zuckerberg for this really more than anybody else. He created a world online, this virtual village, and then it extended it beyond his control. But Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, all of this stuff goes back to the social network. The idea of this nerdy guy in his room with his computer is going to restructure life so that someone like him can be the king. Put us all online. We all got online and suddenly there's this way to communicate that never existed before, that's instantaneous, that there's no authority figure. I mean, they're moderation, but really you can find your way around moderation and there will always be social networks that aren't moderated.

16:27And this gives the power to everyone because we're all connected and communities can can really make things happen in a way that never existed before. I mean, it's it's it's a different time. And we're going to see this. It hasn't come to a head yet. We don't know where that's going to go. But the idea that, you know, everyone on Earth could communicate instantly. You know, it wasn't supposed to be this way. Who knew who knew that it could ever get here? And so we'll see something really crazy happen with it for sure. Yeah, it just feels that there's a reorganization of society around these network states.

17:06You know, crypto is part of that whole thesis as well. But here we are, we're creating different states of groups of people with commonality of beliefs. Yeah. Anywhere in the world instantaneously, right? Humanity has never had this before. No. You have to go somewhere to do something. Right. I mean, it's really remarkable how whatever your interest is, there can suddenly be a million people that you can communicate with who have the same interest. And if something broadly has to happen, it can happen instantaneously. And so, yeah, I mean, I think we're really on the cusp of something that's very powerful that we still don't know where it's going to go.

17:48But I do think it's a moment in time that everything else is different afterwards. And that's what I look for in my books is where are these origins of something spectacular and incredible happening? And yeah, that's what I think the GameStop story is, as it is. And it also weaves in to the Twitter story. Because, right, this is even Elon is trying, for whatever his reasons are, to create kindling underneath this whole concept that people can now get together en masse, share ideas, coalesce out around ideas. is and do stuff it's a twitter story so i mean elon i believe came into the story with these ideals that that are noble you know the idea of that there needs to be this global town hall that is free um that is not you know that is a place where people can express themselves communicate without much moderation um and he believed it was being taken over by this this woke mind virus as he calls it, this sort of cultural chains, you know, that are holding back free speech, that are siloizing us in a very dangerous direction.

19:01And he has this overarching vision that we need to get to Mars, that we're in this momentary window of time where we have the ability, where the light is shining, and that window will close. And if there isn't something like Twitter, you know, it's a little out there. But if there isn't some place where we can all go to express ourselves as a culture, as a humanity, we'll never get there. So that's how he comes into the story. And it goes bad from there. But I mean, in my opinion, and everyone's going to argue about this, there's a lot of different opinions about this. But if you read Breaking Twitter, I come into it with a belief that Elon is trying to do something good.

19:44I was always a fan of his. I've always believed, you know, this is a brilliant guy who's like an Edison and an Einstein. But I think Twitter broke him. And I think it's a huge misadventure. Was it the system that broke him? So, you know, if we go back to the bigger narrative of the people getting together, Elon's kind of in that same boat saying, listen, people need that large freedom of speech or whatever. But what broke him? Was it was it the financial side or is it the fighting the man? Yeah, there's a couple of big things going on here. Number one, I think he saw free speech as something simple that you could engineer.

20:21He believed he could walk in with the right algorithm and solve it just like you solve a rocket. And I believe that free speech is way more complex than a rocket. Social media is more complex than SpaceX because it involves people and it involves emotions, something that Elon is not great at. And it involves, you know, free speech itself is really complicated. As much as people want to say they're for free speech, almost nobody is for unfettered free speech. It's almost impossible to be a free speech absolutist. Nobody, nobody would think that the president of the United States should go on Twitter and say, I just launched a nuclear weapon.

20:59That's free speech, right? But that's insane. Nobody wants that. So there always has to be limitations. And I think Elon came into this story thinking that, you know, Twitter, rightly so, was moderating too much, was holding back certain people for political reasons, maybe because there was pressure from outside, you know, which is federal pressure, whatever you want to say. Certainly Twitter was overmoderated. It was a bloated company. he walks in with this huge offer which he knows is too much money he immediately pisses off the Tesla faithful because they don't want to see him spreading his wings to something that looks like it's going to be a morass of a mess and he tries to back out and Twitter forces him to buy the company so he reluctantly becomes the barbarian at the gate walks through the doors and he's angry And you have to remember, Elon is a complex person in that his emotions drive him enormously.

21:55Even though he's someone who doesn't really seem emotional, he's very thin-skinned. And when he's angry, he's going to go scorched earth. So not only does he take over the company, but he takes it over angrily. He's going to fire everybody. He's going to get rid of the bloat, which is good. But he's going to go after people and try and fire them with cause so they don't get their money, like Parag and the previous head. And so he comes in the doors like that. And then he immediately starts to change things. And what is shocking to him is the amount of pushback he starts to get. And I think what happens, and there's a series of things that happen, which he spirals out of control.

22:31And, you know, it begins with a horrible tweet that he makes. If you remember the story, Paul Pelosi, you know, is the 80-year-old husband of Pelosi, is attacked in his house by a hammer-wielding dude who basically almost beats an 80-year-old man to death. It's a horrible scene. And I put it in the book. And I put it right next to a scene where then Elon goes to Heidi Klum's Halloween party, where Heidi Klum is dressed as a worm. And it's like this crazy, you know, Hollywood kind of scenario. And then Elon retweets a conspiracy theory involving a gay relationship that Paul Pelosi is having. It's a foolish tweet.

23:11It's a joke. It's a meme. It's the kind of thing that Elon does all the time. It feeds to all these conspiracy people. But it's immediately seen as horrific. All the advertisers just don't want anything to do with Twitter anymore. I mean, this is the owner of Twitter tweeting that this Paul Pelosi thing was a conspiracy involving a gay hooker or something, something like that. It immediately sets things off in the wrong direction and things get worse from there. You have the blue check thing, which is a massive disaster where he says everyone's going to have to pay eight bucks for a blue check.

23:42And on the day it happens, you have all these fake accounts coming up, which everyone knew would happen. right? I mean, it wasn't a surprise to anybody, but maybe Elon, where, you know, you have Nintendo with Mario showing the middle finger and you have Eli Lilly saying, you know, it's insulin's going to be free from now on. And you have all of these ridiculous things going on. And then Yoel Law quits the company. And he was the head of the moderation council. And Elon starts to spiral. He goes on stage with Dave Chappelle, right? And gets booed by the audience. And this to me is the first moment where Elon is actually facing people saying they don't like him.

24:21Up until this point, you have to remember, pre-Twitter, he was worshipped. He was the Edison of our times, the Einstein of our times. Anytime he's written about in the media, in the major mass media, it's how brilliant he is, how he's changing the world. And suddenly he's on stage with Chappelle getting booed, right? This is not the same Elon who came into Twitter. And he starts to act very paranoid. And if you read my book, you'll see he's walking around with bodyguards. He makes a rule that nobody at Twitter can gather more than three people because he doesn't want a mutiny to happen. He starts saying, as we fire people, we need to verify they're real people.

24:57And so there's literally a person whose job it is to act like a human captcha, to verify that the person they're firing is an actual person and not a bot. I mean, he's starting to go a little Howard Hughes in the narrative. And it all kind of comes to a head when he tweets out a poll saying, should I stay the head of the CEO or not? And to his shock, the answer is no. And this hits him very hard. And if you read the book, he actually locks himself into his office to the point where Twitter employees are considering calling the police because they think he might harm himself. And this hasn't been reported before or whatever, but they were considering a wellness check on the richest man in the world because he was so devastated by his reputation had taken such a hit at this point that he can't just do what he wants anymore.

25:50And I think that this is a big moment. And so the thesis of my book is that the Elon that comes out of this Twitter situation is not the Elon of before. And now he's acting irrationally. Now he's doing things like he's banning all of the journalists on Twitter. At a point, what happened was his car got attacked. Someone who runs a company called ElonJet.com, which tracks Elon's plane, had printed the whereabouts of his plane, and his kid was in the limo, and the limo got attacked by somebody. And so Elon then went on a crazy night of just throwing people off of Twitter. So suddenly the whole free speech idea has gone out the window, right?

26:26I mean, it's become this personal thing where he's got a vendetta against anybody who tweets anything about Elon Jet or anything like that. So everything's become a mess. And and and that's where we end up. I mean, there's a lot I could keep going. This is a monologue at this point. But I know there's so much craziness that goes on in this period that it's very hard to look at this and say this is rational, that this makes a lot of sense or that even this fits with his own ideology. Hey, everyone, we're going to take a quick pause and hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back.

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27:54But it's weird to write a book where the story hasn't ended yet. Well, all of my books are that way. I mean, if you want to think about it, you know, the social network, almost everything good happened after the end of the social network. I mean, Facebook, all of the craziness with Facebook and dumb money. Similarly, I mean, the GameStop story, I don't think ended when I ended the book. And so I like to really write important moments that are origins of things. A lot of the story, you know, with Twitter is unwritten. We don't know where it's going to go. But I believe I think we know where it's going to go.