Vlad Tenev

Like...

Why do people have out-of-body experiences?

Nobody can explain it.

I've seen all the cases where someone's literally clinically dead, no heart rate, and then they just remember everything that's happening to them in that state.

Yeah, so I make my decisions assuming that I have agency, and of course I can control things, but I think I also...

I'm somewhat superstitious in the sense that even if I can't explain something, if someone has really high conviction, I'll go with it.

So I think the new story of GameStop started with this idea of retail investors banding together on Robinhood to like take down the hedge funds, right?

Solely on Robinhood?

I mean, by and large on Robinhood, I think the other brokers had some of the spillover, like when we had to shut down the buying, particularly at that point, people were like, okay, I want to buy GameStop.

And they started downloading other apps as alternatives.

But I think it started off being Robinhood being the lion's share.

And certainly we were the ones associated with

the positives and then later the negatives of shutting it down.

Still, take Robinhood out of it for a minute.

Explain that.

I'd say there were a couple of things going on at the time, some of which were COVID-related, right?

One of the things was, I think, this nostalgia and sympathy for companies that were kind of unfairly harmed by COVID.

So GameStop and AMC, probably the two biggest examples, but there are also others like Nokia.

A few months earlier, there was a big thing about Hertz and American Airlines, which were, you imagine, people aren't renting cars, people aren't getting on planes, nobody's going to a movie theater, you're not going to a brick and mortar video game retailer to do your gaming.

And unlike the global financial crisis, the government wasn't like stepping in to help these businesses and bail them out.