09 February 2025
Let's Gamble In A Cult | Financial Delusions & When To Admit You're Wrong
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Why is investing in Game Stop going to cause the collapse of the financial system?
In episode #475 of Mere Mortals 'Musings', Juan and I discuss: Tom Bilyeu's perspective that all financial actions are a form of gambling, James Jani's videos on GameStop and Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY), how the irrational belief of "mother of all short squeezes" (MOASS) will lead to the financial system's collapse, our past financial delusions in stocks/properties/NFT's, the aftermath of bubbles bursting and Juan's current delusion of the impact of AI by 2026 (my opinion - correct).
Huge thanks to Lyceum and all the other sat streamers out there. Your support means the world to us!
Timeline:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:00) Gambling Vs Investing
(00:11:53) The GameStop Phenomenon
(00:22:23) Bed Bath & Beyond: The Cult Of The Dead Stock
(00:28:03) Boostagram Lounge
(00:32:00) Personal Financial Delusions
(00:45:02) Profiting From Financial Delusions
(00:53:01) Bitcoin & Ignorance
(01:00:01) Aftermath Of Financial Bubbles
(01:11:52) Robert Downey Jr. On Wall Street
(01:12:50) V4V: Time/Talent/Treasure
In episode #475 of Mere Mortals 'Musings', Juan and I discuss: Tom Bilyeu's perspective that all financial actions are a form of gambling, James Jani's videos on GameStop and Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY), how the irrational belief of "mother of all short squeezes" (MOASS) will lead to the financial system's collapse, our past financial delusions in stocks/properties/NFT's, the aftermath of bubbles bursting and Juan's current delusion of the impact of AI by 2026 (my opinion - correct).
Huge thanks to Lyceum and all the other sat streamers out there. Your support means the world to us!
Timeline:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:00) Gambling Vs Investing
(00:11:53) The GameStop Phenomenon
(00:22:23) Bed Bath & Beyond: The Cult Of The Dead Stock
(00:28:03) Boostagram Lounge
(00:32:00) Personal Financial Delusions
(00:45:02) Profiting From Financial Delusions
(00:53:01) Bitcoin & Ignorance
(01:00:01) Aftermath Of Financial Bubbles
(01:11:52) Robert Downey Jr. On Wall Street
(01:12:50) V4V: Time/Talent/Treasure
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[00:00:07]
Kyrin Down:
Welcome Mere Mortalites to another episode here of the mere mortals musings live 9AM Australian Eastern Standard Time on a Monday, Sunday, Sunday. This is the February 9. You've got Kyrin here on this side. You've got Juan on the other side. And today we're gonna be talking about some delusions.
[00:00:24] Juan Granados:
Financial delusions. Delusions. Financial financial. Some crypto will pop up in there of course,
[00:00:29] Kyrin Down:
but we'll try to avoid it being again, just pure crypto. Yeah. I I we've talked about that a little bit recently. So the the reason for this was a couple of reasons. One, I still had some leftover notes from the Devil Take the Hindmost book. Do you have a lot of notes from that book? I'd so much, man, as I was reading it and creating the notes as I tend to do when I'm doing book reviews, I already knew like, man, this is going to cover multiple things, whatever this is. Like, there's so many notes here. So part of it's that the finale to our unintentional financial focus over the last couple of weeks, I think is how I describe this and most of January, I think we talked like financial things. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, a lot of it was because of this book. It was a really fucking good book. So there was a couple of other things that occurred for me recently. And one of them is I've been diving into more like documentary style YouTube channels if I can find them. So like four thousand and thirty minute plus videos, where there's, it's not exactly journalism, because they're not going out on their own that sometimes they might be doing like some interviews with people,
[00:01:41] Juan Granados:
like a Coffeezilla style. It's seem like less than that, like less less journalistic than that, but
[00:01:49] Kyrin Down:
they'll still put in some efforts. Okay. So the there was this one guy called James Jani, j a n I, and he had a couple of videos on the James stop and then another one Bed Bath and Beyond, which I hadn't really dived into before. I didn't know much of. And boys are some crazy delusion stuff. I think it's BBY. BBY. BBY. BBY. BBY. Is the ticker. That's the ticker. Why it. And a couple of other people have invested some friends, my brother in some things which were obviously financially diluted. And that was the thing that kept coming up in these videos was there's delusion, you can have delusions about what real life is your own grandeur or things like that. But these people were like, there was a specific type related to finances.
And so it was it was almost like you could they were so certain of an event happening that they're willing to bet on it essentially. And that's what investing, speculating, gambling, the spectrum, as we learned from the book. And yeah, I wanted to just dive into this. Why? Why is this kind of niche of financial delusions? And what can we learn from it? I guess?
[00:03:01] Juan Granados:
Okay, I'll take a little spin that you said there about like there's investing, there's, gambling, something I've been listening to recently from particular individual, Tom Bilyeu and his statement around it, which at first I was like, this kind of seems weird, but now that I'm like reflecting on it, kind of went, it's all gambling. It's all gambling and then it just depends how diluted you are about how that gamble goes because even if you're investing, as surefire as you think it might be, property investing, bonds, it's still a gamble. Like you're still gambling, you're still putting forward some money for the hope of a return. Yeah. Now the risk variation is very different, of course. So I would say, bonds or real estate, more traditional, illiquid type of markets, I would say that you're still gambling there in that you're expecting that it's going to go up but that's not assured but there's a very low level of risk there of that going pear shape and if it does, there's also some limitation on the downside of that.
The places where you can get really, really heavily polluted are in very liquid markets where either there's sole individuals that can move the whole entire market or there's other forces at play that are beyond just the, like effective economic markets that have a play in it that just changes things and then you are deluding yourself and how much you can do or the return that you're expecting and then the gamble days like what I guess we would associate it a more true gamble. So I've started to, I had first rebelled against it and now I'm like, you know what? I kind of like it, it's all a gamble. It's all a gamble, be immortalized. Whatever you're doing, it's all a gamble. You think you're putting money on on a property or on shares or in crypto, you're gambling, you're gambling. But it just depends on your level of, I guess, risk and assurity of what's going to come to fruition based on asked or expected, things into the future but also how much you have control over as well. Again, if you have a business, if I was to put a million dollars into a business and it's a gamble, let's see if it works, but there's a lot of it that you control. I would say that's a very controlled gamble, right? There's a lot of factors that you are able to control versus buying some shares. Again, it's a gamble and you have less control over what's going on apart from maybe buying the products or influencing it in some other way. Yeah, I think I think you're using the word gamble in the in a very loose sense. Yeah, look I originally found distaste in the way that the gamble. However, if you look up the definition of gambling that I shouldn't take Tumblr at the absolute face front, But if you look at the definition of gambling, it does actually fit within that constraint. I'll bring up the definition. I saw this Reddit post recently where it was this mom, and she's she's talking about a child. And she's like,
[00:05:47] Kyrin Down:
my child is saying things which I think are wrong, but I don't know how to explain they're wrong. Basically, it was around probability. And so the child was like she was explaining like, you know, there's a 90% chance of this happening. And the kids like, Yeah, that's okay. But there's a 50 there's like a fiftyfifty outcome of whether it happens or not. So it's like, he was using the term fiftyfifty as in like, the, like horse racing or something like this horse is going to come first ninety percent chance that it doesn't. But he'd be like, Yeah, but there's a fiftyfifty outcome of if the horse either comes first or it doesn't come first. And there's like equal weighting of that. And she's trying to I think she she didn't really know about binary of like it's either a yes or a no. But because the kid kept saying fifty fifty she she just like couldn't understand that he wasn't talking about probability because he's a kid. He doesn't know shit about binary. So but he's right in expressing yes, the event either occurred or it didn't occur.
So I kind of feel like this is how you're using gambling. It's like he's using the word he's sort of right, but it's not.
[00:07:00] Juan Granados:
It's not. I'd love to hear him more often than this because it took me a while to like ingest and and become more of a sub definition. The definition of gamble is play games of chance for money. Okay. So, you know, is it a game of money if you're putting money into the share market? I guess you could define it as a game. Is it a chance for money? Another one is to take action in the hope of a desired result. Take risky action in the hope of a desired result. So well then what does risky mean? Yeah, so in any case, in any case, so I think that there's there's the dilution of finance tends to be towards the more riskier the more untethered to your own actions that you can find and you are when you have the language of yeah, I really hope this goes up or what, you know, I think this will go up because of whatever variation, I guess there's more introduction of delusion because it's either outside of the scope of field or you have less control over it or you're purely just hoping on some random past experience for something else to happen. I don't think the liquidity
[00:07:57] Kyrin Down:
matters that much in terms of financial delusions. Like if you find someone who's financially diluted, I don't think it really matters if there is a really open market for whatever they're diluted into. And we'll get into some examples soon. So it's not all just airy fairy. But I think there is something kind of related to that, which is the time length, which which happens. And if they're a real short term focused, then whether whether it's like super liquid, they see whatever they're in into drops by 40%. And they've got a short term time focus, they're gonna sell like, there's no that they're probably not diluted about the, the reality of whatever it is that they're holding, because, like, immediate results are telling them they're wrong. So what I tend to see with a couple of these delusions that I'll get into there's even though there was a liquid market for them, they were just playing in stocks.
They were still deluded about the like the time length of holding it and what that would do for them. And so even though it was going down because their time length was years, if not decades, they did to infinity, they were able to hold and like bear the brunt of the pain. So there is something about the time length and I'm not sure if that changes in so let's say you buy property in Mozambique and you're, you know, it's probably super liquid. Who's gonna buy it from you? Maybe someone in Mozambique, but you know, you could if you bought it here, and you somehow have some registration of it here in Australia, no one's gonna buy it from you here. You know, are you diluted if you think that that still has real value? And you can't realize it?
Yeah, I'm not I'm not so sure about it. Ah, yeah.
[00:09:52] Juan Granados:
Just as you were describing it, then I kind of go, what's your, I mean what's the underlying principles that makes you think that you're not diluted? So again, even in that example of buying a house in Mozambique. At the forefront, kind of sounds diluted but if you really question that, is there a rational or first principles thinking on like why that might be? Now this person might come out and be like well, yeah looking at the trajectory of Mozambique and its population and its economical growth, actually it's the fourth fastest growing market there is and in about ten-fifteen years I could actually see a return that's ridiculously higher than here. Okay, then maybe it isn't diluted, maybe it's a reality at play, maybe it isn't though. Sorry, but unless someone like actually provided that information, they're kind of be like, well, sounds like you're diluted if you have no quite clear view. Same with, so because sometimes in a, say, a company or a business, someone's running a business and they go, I'm hoping from, I want to go from 1,000,000 annual turnover to 10,000,000 annual turnover.
Wonderful! And then it kind of just go, yeah, it's kind of like like not the sameness but like it's it's going to be lucky. Like it just if it's going to happen man it was just by luck or you just exerted so much effort to make it happen and whatnot. And so maybe at the end of that ten year, at the end of the year you do make 10,000,000 I don't think you'd associate, you were still delusional and man, you were just lucky and there's a lot of hard work that came to it. Yeah. Versus, you know, same thing. Someone says I'm not a million, I want to get $10,000,000 but they lay out all of these foundational thinking and maybe the way that they can do it and they're broken it down.
Now, the same amount of luck has to kind of play out for that to happen along with the effort and the planning but then I wouldn't think them to be as delusional in it because there's more fundamental thing that's going to it. So I think that also different, even though it's the exact same thing, like the exact same thing has happened, but in one aspect, our human influence has been, oh, you've thought about this more, hence, you're not as delusional, even though the rest of the market is exactly the same. Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:53] Kyrin Down:
Let me jump into the GameStop Bed Bath Beyond because there's a real clear example of what financial delusion is. So, a good video to watch, as I mentioned, James Janney, one of them is called the Cult of the Dead Stock And then the other one is either a prequel or a sequel to that. So you'll find it from related links in there. And there's a couple of things you note in there right at the start, the cult and what he shows in this kind of investigation is very cult like behavior. And so essentially, for those who don't know, GameStop emerged from, I guess, the YouTube slash Reddit of this guy, Roaring Kitty, who also had the moniker deep fucking value on Reddit.
And he laid out this thesis of why he thought GameStop was actually a good investment at $3.05 dollars And he actually put a lot of thought into it. He had no rational analysis of I think it's undervalued because of this XYZ reason, you know, financial data to back it up. If he was wrong, it wasn't he wasn't deludedly wrong. Like he had he had there was a reasonable sanity of reasons of why he was he was investing in this. And the thing with GameStop and sorry, the WallStreetBets subreddit is they they kind of incentivize the wildness there is, there's, I heard some people saying recently like why why do people invest in some things even though there's, there's like a really good chance of it going wrong. And they know there's a really good chance of it going wrong. And it's because you can actually get some social capital in this sub. Yeah, you're posting a $50 loss,
[00:13:45] Juan Granados:
and you'll get all these lights.
[00:13:48] Kyrin Down:
It might not be financial value you're getting. But you're, you're getting some sort of value from doing that. And especially even like showcasing your loss, like who in history is proudly go on about showcasing their losses, like no one ever yet. Now there is a community where like, we're basically doing flex and be saying like, I lost this much. Yep. So there's weird, you know, on unintuitive examples of behavior going on in there already where you're like, okay, that doesn't make sense. But in the context of the subreddit, it makes sense. Long story short, GameStop, people started investing in it and then there's kind of cult developed around Roaring Kitty. He was doing live streams and he was showcasing once again his data, but now he was, you know, hyping it up a bit more. You saw he he went from just like kind of clean-cut looking into the camera, you know, well presented to fucking glasses on wearing a bandanna.
I'm not sure if he was drinking in them as well, but I seem to recall him having a drink or two. So it became more of a show. And this this idea developed called the MOAS. Do you know what the MOAS is? The mother of all short squeezes. Yes, correct. Yep. And so short squeeze is for is for when there's people shorting a company and you as a kind of conglomerate group and of retail individuals can buy up enough stock so that there's no stock for them to buy back. And so it's kind of like a an artificial pump of the stock in some essence where is it artificial if everyone just agrees to hold it and then therefore there's scarcity and therefore it has value? Yeah. You know, artificial is a hard word to to grasp nowadays, especially with AI.
[00:15:40] Juan Granados:
And is it is it actually artificial? Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that some people will say, right? Because like, all you know, is an artificial generator when you go for the short squeeze. But the reality of it is, that is how the whether it's stocks or other things because you're going to have a buyer and seller on either end. That is just normal market. It's how they turn out. Exactly. So it's not it's not really The addition of the internet subreddit cult
[00:16:02] Kyrin Down:
group behavior is is a little bit different, but But again, it that that emerged naturally. I don't think there was anyone in that subreddit group being like, let's fucking make a cult. No. No. But I think it's it's the it's
[00:16:13] Juan Granados:
the common, like, question of its value and price. And the price is determined by the interest that is seen by an individual or a group. So again, yes it created a short squeeze but it was because there was just a lot of interest in the buying portion of it. This is the same thing that's happened with tons of different assets, this happens all the time which is just you've got more buyers and you've got sellers and there's more pressure there so you're just gonna have one thing going on. So yeah, that short squeeze and there's been lots of other short squeezes like that, that particular short squeeze I think was all the hedge funds that are holding all those shorts basically got to the point that they were like, oh man, we have to cover our bases. Yeah. And I think it was like a 2000%
[00:16:47] Kyrin Down:
increase in GameStop's share price and everyone just like, yeah. So it went from $3 up into hundreds, essentially. And a lot of people, Roaring Kitty, made a lot of money from this. Now there was a lot of people who also didn't because this gained widespread attention at the time. And then even after the time, you know, I'm still watching videos years after the event now and the MOA, so they're short squeezes. This has been done before. People know about it. It's a common thing in financial markets, but the MOA was that was something I'd never heard of before and it was only watching this video that really made me go, Oh shit, this is a whole nother level of financial delusion. So do you know what some of the people actually believe? What would the MOAS would bring about how it would occur? And okay, so so essentially, there's there was like, okay, we're gonna short squeeze these hedge funds, but they started to develop, what you would start to say is irrational logic behind what hedge funds do, how the financial markets work and things like this.
And so they started to be like, oh, okay, there's they're actually doing illegal things behind the scenes and that there's a short selling more than there is actual stock. So and I'm not sure if this is technically possible or not. I'm inclined to believe no, that so essentially, short selling is where you I won't get technically would be able to feel if you're leveraging it. If it's unlevered multiplier, then you should technically be able to do beyond the shares that exist. Yeah. It's I don't know if there's financial regulations in place to stop you doing that. Yeah. I don't know. Probably not. Probably not. Because, you know, if there's leverage, how come you just can't lever up and buy more stock than there is actual stock? You know, that sort of deal. So I have the feeling that this is the sort of thing where I'd go, there's probably some sort of backstop here where there is some rules saying, hey, you can't do this, but it doesn't matter. People in the subreddit were not believing that. So they were going, holy shit, you know, if we can get this short squeeze really going, they're going to have to buy up, you know, so much stock that they're going to be coming for, like, my individual pieces of stock. Like that's how much stuff they're going to have to buy back.
They can't just use what's on the current open market. They need to literally buy up everything. So the MOAS was if we just hold on this short squeeze will not only like drive the price to thousands, tens of thousands make us all millionaires like, hey, that's what we're all in this for, right? GME to the moon sort of deal. It's going to go to an it's not going to go to the moon, it's going to go to an infinity. And so what this will do is it's going to break the whole financial system, they are going to have to company, they're going to have to like go to the government for money, the government's not going to be able to print enough money, it's going to cause widespread like all debts, everything will be liquidated, to try and buy back the stocks that I hold.
And, you know, it went into full on prepper. What are you going to do when the MOAAS hits? Because the whole financial you're going to be filthy rich, of course. But you're going to be the one of the richest people on earth. But all financial markets are going to break everything. And it's like, it's hard to know if they're just larping like live action role playing. This is fun. Or if they're actually believing it. And this is the question that comes up with a lot of cults. Did they actually believe it? Or was this There would definitely be a part of them that would would have believed that for sure. I think that's how humanity tends to go. There's, there's certainly like, probably say, like low IQ individuals who will be all in there's some people who are making a financial profit from things that are like off to the side. And so like, let's say you are a prepper, you start proponing the the MOAS theory, and you're also selling bunkers and prepping equipment to all the holders of GME. There's an incentive there for you a financial incentive outside of the MOAS for you to be doing this and holding GME. So that, that was where I was just like, oh, this is, this is like straight up financial delusion.
You think you're going to cause the entire financial system to collapse just because you hold GME and you're not going to sell it even when it gets into tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Nah, just upload it to today.
[00:21:25] Juan Granados:
GME obviously didn't go over it, did you? No, it didn't. It's still actually above those prices of those, you know, pre whatever it was, 2021 or whatever to 24 US dollars that I just checked in. It got up to $81 80 1 US dollars is what it got from. Whereas $3 whatever all $3 coming to $81 US dollars at the top, but it's still $24 So technically a lot of them made a lot of money still, like it still went quite up and above. I have no idea what the short seller market looks like on that particular one. But yeah, that's interesting. And they did force a lot of hedge funds to exit out of their short selling. Yeah, I do believe there was one hedge fund that actually There was one of those or like something happened back to them. So they did take an effect, but it wasn't a delusional, we we're going to break the entire system type of level. No, no.
[00:22:11] Kyrin Down:
The addition onto this is like, okay, you can look at GME and you'd be like, okay, this is, you know, there's a bit of delusion there, but there's probably a small subset. These are people who got in probably late, you know, at that peak. Yeah. 80, 80 ish, 70 ish dollars And now they're on the way down. And they're just like, fuck, I've lost so much money that I've already put into this. I don't want to feel the pain of actually having this loss. I'd rather just believe in the theory that it will be worth more someday, rather than the financial pain of actual realized losses. So that one I can kind of understand.
The other video was about BBY BBB. And the this is for Bed Bath and Beyond. Another company that was very similar to GameStop, and that it was in a kind of declining industry didn't have good revenues, things like that. Like it's a company that if you just looked at it as a whole, you're like, it's not doing so well. It's in a bit of a spot of bother. Now, the same guy who took over GME when it was in its kind of crazy stage, Ryan Cohen, he, he took over this company as well. He bought a bunch of shares and became CEO and the GameStop people are like, well, let's go. Let's go. Let's fucking go. So essentially, another cult developed probably a smaller one, but with the hardcore elements who were more invested into the underlying things. So they have GameStop because so much people made money from it. They kind of hailed this guy Ryan Cohen is like he turned around GameStop like it's amazing, fortunate revival of the company. Like he's a genius. So So when he takes over another one, they're like, it's gonna happen again.
You know, GameStop two point zero Here we go. BBY. This is where it gets into a whole other levels of delusion where they start. Now, this guy doesn't really do podcasts or interviews or anything like that. But he does tweet a lot. And so, with like BBY, more bad and bad news was coming out like, oh, okay, you know, they're going to have to close down stores, things like this. There was just once again, like another subset of people, one dude would like go out to headquarters where one of the I think it was the CFO or CTO committed suicide jumped out of a building, right after like, it was announced they were going into bankruptcy or something like that.
Was it directly related to that probably had some influence of him. But you know, likely he had other things going on in his life as well. And people were like going out to stores harassing the doorman to get into there and be like, did he actually die? Was he even real? Is he still alive? This sort of deal? They started analyzing Ryan Collins tweets for like hidden meaning meanings. And so when he put like an eye emoji on a shopping cart full of food or something, they'd be like, Oh, this means he's like, he's watching out for us and he's looking after our bags and things like this. He wrote a children's book, Ryan Cohen, for some reason, they started analyzing like Biggity Bear and how Biggity Bear is actually like referencing to like, you know, the Bed Bath and Beyond and this sort of stuff. And they just went into ridiculous levels, to the point where it went bankrupt.
And then it's like, okay, there's a set date where all the shares are just going to be taken off exchanges. And days before they're still being like, okay, but this event could occur, which means there's going to be a revival. So still don't lose hope yet. You know, your shares are still going to be worth something. So even when it's all
[00:26:11] Juan Granados:
gone. Crazy.
[00:26:12] Kyrin Down:
Yeah. And they had similar characters. There was a guy who was live streaming. I think his name was like PP or something like that. And once again, there were other characters who were obviously kind of grifting off of this. He PP himself was he was making money by people donating into the show and stuff like this. The whole thing was just made me go, how do you get to such a point where you're you're at the point where you're just so deluded of what reality is that I and it and it didn't have any of these aspects of like, sure, there was a cult leader who was kind of charismatic, but it wasn't in person. It was all it was all via the Internet.
It didn't have a lot of the other social things you see in cults where they're locked into a certain compound or something like that. So they so there's no escape financially or physical escape as well. So it seemed like a voluntary. Delusion to culture. And delusion in some sense where it was it was just a psychological effect of losing money was probably the only thing. I I was holding them all together. Yeah, look, maybe if that was a real psychologist, I could go into it here and be like, okay, the financial portion wasn't actually that big. It was more about being part of a community of making friends of things like that. I think the money aspect would have been a big piece of it, Brian. It also might have been so heavily related. That's, you know, we're going to the moon. The posts were all about improving your life and making financials.
[00:27:50] Juan Granados:
Also, the ticker was BBBY. Oh, okay. Sorry. I'll look at BBBY and I was like, why is it the top price of that? Yeah. I didn't
[00:27:58] Kyrin Down:
Between the two of us. Triple B Y. We managed to Yeah.
[00:28:03] Juan Granados:
Okay. Let's take a pause. We'll do some boostagrams, in the boostagram land and we'll get back into it. Sure. But I don't think we've got any boost to grams in terms of the actual messages. However, a big call out to lithium. I see him. I see him who's been pumping through the streaming. Is it is it streaming? Yeah. It would come through the streaming from true fans. Looks like they've been basically pumping through 30 sets per ten minutes or per minute.
[00:28:29] Kyrin Down:
Yeah. So like huge thanks. That's a lot coming through there from like, see him. Martin Lindas Cook. So yeah, we don't see the streaming normally. It's just when people are streaming through on Truefans. So I'm not not able to see that normally. But yeah, very much appreciated. So all the streamers out there who are the, you know, the hidden lurkers who don't like to message a big shout out to you. Thank you very much for supporting the show. We I see the numbers when I do my quarterly reviews. And so we very much appreciate your your support to the show financial measure. And if you want to do that yourself, two links down below meremortalspodcast.com/support and then also the PayPal link.
Right. And also just note to everyone, I have changed a lot of our yes linkages. So it's mere mortals pods on Twitter now. Yep, it's mere mortal podcasts on Instagram and TikTok. And I can't get a discord invite link that says that unless we get some boosts. So if you also want to boost our discord, give it a and when I say boost, I mean, like, that's the discord language. Oh, gotcha. Yeah, like there's a boost boost thing. Yep, boost diamond, whatever it is. So we need three of those to be able to do invite links which have mere mortals podcasts on it as well. Gotcha, okay. We'll see. Maybe changes to the website sometime in the future. Correct, yeah. There's some 2FA in it and got to the Yeah. Main models podcast.
[00:29:55] Juan Granados:
No, with a just Oh, with a little T and there will be an S to come. For the website. Correct.
[00:30:01] Kyrin Down:
One last shout out on the, the GameStop stuff or two actually. There's a guy, Maratz Rants, which was really, really funny because he was all in on the GameStop. But then he was one of the biggest caller adders of the BBBY thing. And so there was a dude who straddled both worlds where he's like, this is the most ridiculous shit I ever like. You're looking into tweets or Roncaller, like he's not going to save you. But then still to this day, it was like, I'm buying one GME stock every single day. So there's there's there's, you know, methods to the madness as well.
I don't know how you actually square that. Yeah. It reminds me of my colleague I once worked with who I was baiting with some conspiracy theories because I knew I knew he liked him and he was he was fucking delusional. He wasn't financially diluted. Maybe generally, it was just straight up diluted. And I was baiting him one time and I was like, he was all into nine eleven. I don't know if you'd call this a conspiracy theory, but certainly like young Earth, you know, Earth is 6,000 years old sort of thing whilst working as a like almost as a geologist in the mind. Like you could literally see this rock face and the different stratum and shit. Some highway. With illusioning out to like. Yeah. Yeah.
He was very good at manipulating facts and reasons to suit his agenda. And I was like, oh, yeah. You know, I've always been partial to the moon landing one. And man, he fucking ripped into me. You're the dumbest. That's so fucking stupid, man. Have you looked into the like? And he was just ripping on me for for bringing this up. And I was I was baiting him into it and instead he ended up turning it on me and be like, you're so fucking dumb and just was like, wow, man, this is crazy. I didn't expect that. Full blind delusion. You mentioned it before.
Well, actually, here's a question for you. Is there any financial beliefs you've had that you would say you were deluded upon or that you were you can be straight up wrong in your gambling or your bets, but is there anything where you've been deluded by?
[00:32:16] Juan Granados:
One aspect I think I would say would be at the very my younger years, I think I was diluted into how much net benefit financially properties brought other than that at the very initial, like we're talking now, like twelve years ago or something, I think initially the, the assessment of properties as a financial asset, I was diluted in that, oh, yeah, you know, there's with capital gains and rental gains. And it wasn't for a few years. Two times the gains. Yeah, until like kind of the determinant they're like, well, when you actually take into account all the other costs and at least here in Australia, the way that it's set up, there's extra taxation things that you have to pay and once you reach certain thresholds other taxations that kind of come into play. There was again not a big delusion but there was some more realizations of reality of like oh okay yeah there's some other offsets that happened here and maybe I was deluding myself of what the eventual, multipliers or growth perspectives were in that area. It's still not a bad thing, but I think I was diluted in that aspect of it, of its multiples. The other one I think financially I would say that I was always alluded in was NFTs and the very second I'm talking 2020, '20 '20 '1 type of years. I was very deluded in that I was holding very good 6 figure NFT bags type of deal and being like, doesn't matter. This is going to go 7 figures, 8 figures. That looking back and I'm like, okay, one today kind of realizes on You can go back and look at those as well. We've got those recorded on there. So I think the delusion there was looking at it from today's perspective is to some point now that I've gone through it in a personal experience, a lot of markets very much depend on demand versus actual capacity to deliver to that. And that looking at that now, I was like, okay, very much the demand was at a very at a peak and capacity or the availability to the market was starting to like go up and up and up and up because if you remember for NFTs around those years there was things on the market but there wasn't that many and it started becoming this hyperbolic where everyone was creating NFTs and pursuing projects so the amount of things in the market started to increase at the same time as probably the demand started to decrease and that sort of crossover is no good. I think with today's knowledge, I would have seen that and gone, oh, crap, time to start, like, don't be deluded. This is not just gonna multiply 100 times over from here. It could have under very, very rare unique circumstances. I didn't eventually. So like CryptoPunk, you know,
[00:34:58] Kyrin Down:
if you'd bought one of them, you'd still would have been up in 5 figure territory for a long time. Oh, for sure. And yes, you if you're up in 7 figures, and you're like, I could, you know, if I sell this, I'll never be able to get it back in again, if it goes to 8. There's there's Yeah, there's a lot of my phone and, and things like that, which how would I put it? Yeah, standard things that you'll see in financial markets everywhere, where it's like,
[00:35:33] Juan Granados:
short term bursts of energy. Yeah, I think my general financial dilutions I've seen progress is that not if you're looking at it more so statistically, not everything is going to be as high returning as I think it's actually going to be. But on the inverse as well, I think I am more comfortable at aiming for the items that are going to be the ten one hundred multipliers that have a lower probability but that I can input maybe less capital towards for that to potentially happen than to bother with the two five x multipliers That type of mentality. But that's a little bit different. I guess. Yeah, you know, I think there might be a reverse
[00:36:19] Kyrin Down:
Peter Thiel quote here, which could be useful, which is yonder. Yeah, underestimate what you can do in what is that one year or overestimate, sorry, overestimate what you can do in one year and underestimate in five year, actually, no, it's it's basically the same thing. You overestimate what you can make financially in a year. But you probably underestimate what you could do over five years if you'd if you just like,
[00:36:46] Juan Granados:
lock in. Well, so this is all I remember this. I remember this very well, when I was 20 years, either 25 or 26. I remember putting together like a five year plan by the time I was 30. So that was four or five years of financially. And I remember this very well in that two years into it. My idea of the progress towards that, I was like, Oh my God, I was so deluded like what the hell? There's no way you are far behind. I was so far behind. How is this even gonna happen? This is just ridiculous. Again, in that time frame, it felt like I was diluted financially on what I was thinking.
Again, if and it very much depends on timeline, if that is your timeline, yeah, you're going to be diluted more than likely in what you're thinking you have to, on those shorter scales, probably have to pull back for the reality. But then on a slightly longer timescale, I remember hitting when I was 31. I remember looking back at that and went Holy shit! Like I actually went flying past that number and my anticipated, because I had like a, you you know, what was the per month income that needs to be coming in to satisfy what I want. I remember that time when I was twenty fivetwenty six looking at him going, I'll look, let's just make like a laughable thought and let's just say it's yeah something like this number that'd be pretty funny. Then comes you know whatever it was five six years later and not only was that achieved it was like laughably easy achieved. I went, Woah! That which I probably would have thought was the man I'm deluding myself financially now I was like, Oh no, that was pretty rudimentary that was gonna happen.
And the opposite, which was more around the, total assets at a shorter time frame, that one was the one that was actually diluting myself. But then if I was 25, 20 six, I thought it was like the opposite way around. So yeah, be very watchful I think of the timelines you give certain things because yeah, the shorter scales, you will financially dilute yourself more than likely. On longest, longest scales, you won't. Like that's like a, I've now heard it a lot of times and I've experienced it a lot. Yeah. And man's just basically explaining the, you know, we like to think linearly.
[00:38:48] Kyrin Down:
We're going to just go up in a kind of straight gradual line. Correct. But he's wearing the banana shirt at the moment. And instead that whole theory is basically like compounding, compounding, compounding and then it just shoots up because of the compounding effects more than anything else. Correct. Correct. Correct. The my financial delusions, I would say I had two ish. One was, I could beat the market. I'm better than the fucking market, I can beat the market. And so when I was investing in stocks, I was reading financial reports and picking out ones. And I think I think I knew I could use my specialized mining knowledge to get a bit of a leg up.
No, no, not good. You know, I read the intelligent Vesta, I tried my best. I had some very rudimentary metrics of measuring these things. After and I mentioned this recently after selling all the stock, so I had a clean slate, I could look at all the data, I would have been much better off financially if I just bought and held the end market index fund Vanguard the entire time. I didn't do too badly below so you know, it's not like I was fucking crashing and burning. And overall, I still did pretty financially well out of investing in stocks, certainly much better than holding cash. The problem was, I certainly was deluded in that thinking I'm going to be the market buying all these things. Now I look back and I'm like, goddamn, I wasted a lot of time reading financial reports, which I didn't need to and I didn't enjoy doing that either. So that was a waste of time. The other one was,
[00:40:26] Juan Granados:
See, actually just interesting on that. I guess it's very much depends on individuals as well. So as much as you call out that, you know, you did that and you read a lot of financial reports and like, like, you know, that was a waste of time. I guess there are probably other individuals listening to the knowledge of me and more likes. I would say because I did that when I was younger, it actually has played out a lot of ways in the fact that I do now. So whether it was like, if I'm looking to buy a business and I've probably looked at fifteen, fifteen different businesses I was looking to buy and gone through the entire like financial reports or existing businesses that we're doing.
The fact that I'm able to like read those financial reports is a lot because I did that when I was younger with a lot of other companies. I'm like, oh yeah, I can see and read and not on an accounting detailed level but I can understand what's going on even more so now with AI. Like you just need to know what to ask it basically for a lot of those things. But I actually went, I'm really glad I did that. Like that was a great payout for doing that when I was younger. Yeah. See for me, I have no interest in that, you know, businesses and all those things.
[00:41:27] Kyrin Down:
That don't interest me. Yeah. The other one was, I did have a stonk shout out to CMC Chinese Magnesium Corporation. Yeah. This was more a recommendation from my dad. So he was the one who was probably more financially diluted than I in terms of what this company could do and how it was run, basically was ending up I don't know what you'd call it probably close to white collar crime in terms of the actions of the directors and essentially like they hoarded a bunch of money from Australians and the promise of the largest singly vertically integrated magnesium producer in in the world.
And it was being developed in China. And this was like in the era of like, Chinese manufacturing, starting to become more about like quality rather than quantity, I guess, and some sort of thing. And they just flee some money. And apparently, they're all living in Singapore now or something, the directors of this. So good. Yeah. But in any way, this I had the stock on my, on my, technically, it was still in the ASX for a while, at some point it disappeared. And I still had it on my own internal streets. And at some point, I'm like, I think I can just legally lock this in as a loss now. Like, it's so it's a liquid. There's no there's no do it. Do I still legally own any of this? I have no idea. Maybe I still do but Let me, let me put on my,
[00:42:56] Juan Granados:
Machiavellian hat on. Okay. I mean, I'll just finish reading the $48 of power. So, where can you profit off financial delusions as well? Right. Because I feel like I have profited off some financial delusions. So if you can power in that is that if you can see what financial delusions are kind of like GameStop, BBBY, BBBY and a few others, you can profit off that financially. My brother did. Yeah, my brother made money and
[00:43:22] Kyrin Down:
I like he made money from SafeMoon on the in crypto, which is like, like in 2021
[00:43:29] Juan Granados:
is run. And
[00:43:31] Kyrin Down:
that was just straight up scam. I remember him explaining to me the liquidity pool scenario, how this dips in here. And I remember it being like, this is so fucking dumb. And I can't do it himself. Yeah. Now I'm the biggest of the Safemoon tattoo in the chest. And he made money and like. Good put in, you know, put in hundreds throughout and brought out thousands, multiple thousands, if not getting into the 10,000 sort of range. And then he recently showed me a screenshot. He made money from GameStop as well. I didn't even know who bought it and he made, you know, like a 20% profit from it. So I'm sure he was financially diluted on whatever was happening, but he also had some sort of inherent thing in him, which was like cut losses as not even cut losses, take wins. Take wins. And unfortunately, another listener of the show, Cole, is he's kind of the opposite. He had AMC and, yeah, the only benefit from him was he lost 69%.
So nice, funny number. But,
[00:44:37] Juan Granados:
not, not didn't didn't get to take any games. Yeah. But like for me personally with there was there's three clear ones, but two where there was a an old shed, which was a it's called Renigen lithium. Okay. Now that still exists. And I was I began buying it because I was slightly financially diluted on what the promise of it was. I do believe at the time I was buying it at around dollar something dollar 40 dollar 50. So it was something to do with lithium right? Correct and it was like I had this and helium and I was just diluted back again. Read the documents. So much Helium. So much Helium on the planet and they had like the and again there's a lot of like hearsay what they find but I got caught up in the hype of it. Now what is this hype coming from? Like you're reading ASR? I found it from both some news sources but also like individual people who were kind of calling it out. Okay. That also had a bit of a following and the interesting thing that happened was I ended up buying it at a good time and it sort of started creeping up but I was able to spot that it was a financial dilution for many earlier on so then I had the privilege to sell out at a really nice top value and then got to see the demise of this because in the reality hit of oh they don't have as much helium and actually there's all these other issues and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So then I got to participate and then go oh I just profited well from my financial dilution and then similarly to how you were talking about with Magnesium there was both a magnesium company and a sand company, MGU and ELT, that I both was able to see the same behavior of financial dilution. So like kind of sitting on the outside, I was able to watch people go, oh, this is going to achieve this, is going to achieve that. So at the time I was like daily checking stocks and what people were doing and as soon as there was a bit of a proliferation towards a particular one, I would go like, cool, that's my little ride, I'll go on it knowing full well that's gonna go up slightly and it will peter off at whatever sort of transit and then people will kind of come off the back of it going up and continue to do buy on the way down. And I went, I've seen this now a couple of times, get in, watch as it goes up, take some profits at the top, don't worry about it being like oh nobody's gonna 10x, nah, just take the 2x, fantastic move on. And so I was able to do that but then at the same time I tried that strategy in other places and it absolutely like destroyed me as well. So, you know, there's a bit of a balance.
In fact, you wouldn't you wouldn't have thought this one I guess because it's an AI company. It was an AI company before the AI like pump was on, APX Appen. And Appen Altrum buying it at like $10.11 dollars and it went it was going all the way up. It went up to like $40 and I was buying it all the way up and I was like, yes, this is I can see it. It's AI company. Where was I diluted? If you actually look at the underlying business model of it, I'm not gonna get this exactly right. But the underlying model of this is that what happened was, was this, business which would actually have like, oh, you've taken an image and you wanna assess what that image is. They would have a million people that they basically hide to go and basically do a review of the image and improve the models for the big players out there. And I kind of went early like, oh, AI has got some aspects of AI. They're helping.
Oh, well, no, because actually it's just a prop AI. It's just brute human. It's just human brute force. So when prop AI came in, I believe the app and share is like 40¢ or a dollar to this day. So I remember holding it and buying it as it kept on going down. Oh, no. Financially diluted being like, it was a 40 and it's like 30. I'm like, I'm buying some more 20. I'm buying some more $15 I'm buying some more. Yeah. And I wasn't until it's like $5 and I was like, okay, it's time to exit out of this gigantic loss. And I was like, let's lock in some losses. So at the same time, you can still get caught up in the financial delusions of your own mind. This is true.
[00:48:32] Kyrin Down:
You know, I'm the current financial delusion I perhaps now is like the banana zone, I think I can make some profits from from that. And it's once again, I'm not going to be looking at like the the metrics of this amount of wallets doing this activity, maybe some on chain metrics, like in a very, very minor thing. But it's more of the, the, the hype, the psychological aspects of the market rather than underlying deep fundamentals or something like that. So perhaps I'm deluded that I think I can, you know, part of the reason I made these videos on the, the, the crypto one, for example, of what I think like behavior of top and bubble bubble peak forming and stuff like that. Part of it's like, I want to see if I can do it. I want to see if I can pick when the top is and. Yeah, well, like, we'll see. We'll see if I'm successful or not.
There's a very good chance I'm going to learn the lesson that a lot of people have learned, which is, you know, just buy a BTC all of them. All of it. I'll be there. There's a saying there's a saying There's a there's a slight gambling streak in me. There is no doubt. There's a saying in financial markets, right? That it's, you know, when the tide goes out, you'll find out who's wearing pants and who's not wearing pants. Who's swimming naked. Who's swimming naked. And one of the biggest call out for if you want to catch yourself around financial dilutions
[00:49:56] Juan Granados:
is if everything was to, you know, implode, go tits up or something goes erroneously wrong or go over the worst possible predictor of everything, will this business idea, stock, share, crypto, whatever, will it still succeed? Is the underlying value or ideals still hold true? And for some of the things that we've talked about before, Bitcoin. You talk about Bitcoin, but even the most enforced thinkers out there that mean crypto is a shit all around. There is still something to say about Bitcoin and its underlying
[00:50:27] Kyrin Down:
idea. I wanted to bring this up because I think you're gonna have financial delusion of not understanding as well. And particularly you see this with BDC. So I've got it and particularly when it's their job to understand economics or markets in general. So the layperson, sure, I understand why you wouldn't want to dive into the technical aspects, how the revolutionary aspects of it, the freedom technology, all that sort of shit. You know, if you're making money selling, you know, I don't know, goods on eBay, ecommerce or something. And that's your speciality, if you're good at reading financial reports and actually managing to understand that and do well from that, you know, like you don't need to understand this stuff.
But if it's your job to understand financial markets broad at large, I'm talking Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Jamie Dimon, Nassim Taleb, Bill Gates, Paul Krugman, Ruben Nerini, Peter Schiff. These are all, Adam like diamond encrusted haters of BTC or and cryptocurrencies in general, but especially of BTC. It's rat poison, it's rat poison squared. You know, this sort of shit. I think they're financially diluted. Like, I think they're diluted to still once upon a time. Sure. There's maybe you can just brush something off as you know. Yeah, sure. It's this thing. It's coming out of nowhere. It's a beanie bubble, beanie babies, whatever.
When it's when it's like you're four cycles deep and you're still saying the shit and it's at, you know, still like hidden all time highs.
[00:52:05] Juan Granados:
I they're financially diluted, right? Like, can you say they're not financially diluted? Well, but I think this is I think this is my like, thing now with so I was talking about specifically Bitcoin, I went to about the rest, specifically Bitcoin. I think that the, there's all sorts now of financial delusion both on the side of individuals who understand markets who are like, well, fuck this shit, this is like rat poison, not touch it. But there's also the financial deluded I think that, I still view it as people who are thinking it's going to hit a million dollars or it's going to hit half a million dollars. I think, there's financial, realities that it could, it could absolutely.
But that conversation, both the Chiefs and the Bill Gates have the same issue that the ones who are wanting it to go at a half a million or a million or those conversations have, which is they're all to some extent financial dilutions. Maybe some will come true, right? There's still probabilities on both sides of the equation. But at the middle of it, the principle again, if Bitcoin went to zero, if Bitcoin went to a dollar today, right? There is still aspects of Bitcoin that still hold it as being valuable. In that yes you can be separate to the banking system you can interact directly one on one to another peer out there it still holds that value even if the price of it has deteriorated to a point that maybe people who have wanted to get to a million never did. So, it's still value within that, like it's still usable. Again, the comparison to stocksis.com, Bubble in the verse. Similar time, pets.com and Amazon basically all, created in terms of the, share price. Pezocom eventually just got, I think it got re bought out by somebody else. But Amazon lost $92.95 percent.
But underlying Amazon losing all of its value, well, sorry, losing all of its price per market capital, underlying that was still a really good business model that people are going to use and so eventually it came back. I can't see that with Bitcoin where it's like, Yeah, even if it dropped another 80%, ninety %, forty %, whatever, underlying that, there's some good value that hasn't come about at all, right? And there was lots of unique ways of the way that it was created, the way that it was set up as a protocol, the way people operate with it now. It's like that value won't change, that's still there. But the price itself, I think is where people can get into the financial delusion around it.
I don't think I'm all the way across in that, Hey, I want to own Bitcoin for its value. There's still aspects of me that'd be like, Oh, yeah, very much a price. But it's maybe it's inching a little bit more towards that that end. But I go the Bill Gates and the conversations that's financially diluted because like okay, yeah we're not talking you're not talking about the value of what that product benefits, you know, from a value, you're talking price. And there's the other aspect where you see people talking about, yeah, it's gonna reach half a million, a million, 2 million. Then I also go, there's some financial delusions there.
I won't say it's a gamble, an investment. It's a prediction for it to happen. And there are some basis as to it doing that. At least there's some linkages because of the value underlying that. But I still kind of go, Yeah, but I, I, there was something in a podcast I listened to recently, it was like, eventually, hope for something like Bitcoin would be for it to become not volatile anymore and to be stable in its price. And the more stable that price is, I think the more the value of Bitcoin itself will become apparent. Because right now it is just price city up down everyone has a conversation. I have not seen for a long especially maybe on audio like podcasts and videos maybe I do see it but especially on like people putting it into like blogs or anything. I haven't seen for a long time people talking about the underlying value of Bitcoin. It's just price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price like, okay, so I guess a financial delusion in my mind is, I don't know if there's exactly a delusion, but if tomorrow Bitcoin goes doubles, dollars $300 bang, it's trillion $300,000 I think overwhelmingly, it will be conversation of price.
Underwhelmingly, there won't be a lot of conversation about the value of Bitcoin. Yeah, I don't
[00:56:20] Kyrin Down:
I don't I think there's kind of separate topic to be honest around financial diligence. The so for example, the I think the the people who are arguing against Bitcoin, the so some of them, I think it's it's kind of this, there's a financial incentive for them to argue against them. Looking at you, Peter Schiff, like he gets so much engagement, he gets so much name recognition, people bring him on podcasts, because they like to dunk on him. And I think he's kind of a semi willing participant in this where he's like, if I talk about Bitcoin in a negative way, I get engagement, I get positive things happen from this side. I think there's something to that for a couple of them shift maybe Nassim Taleb.
The other ones though, they're arguing against the in some way, miss they're misguided of the fundamental aspects of it, though they don't know about it, they haven't put in enough work to look into these things. So they perhaps don't know what humans actually want or reality actually is for a lot of people. And where they or they just is it diluted if you're ignorant? Probably not. I probably wouldn't call that diluted. So maybe a lot of these people. Yeah, maybe a lot of them saying they're financially diluted is incorrect. They're just really, really ignorant of, of what Bitcoin is. So,
[00:57:53] Juan Granados:
you know, and Like, let's just broaden it just not descriptive. I would just say, I think you would be financially, I think you've got to be financially diluted if the some of the basic principles you just not willfully like specifically you're being obtuse or trying to do away with some of the basic principle like like demanding capacity like demand if you're just not even caring about that or anything Financial, you're missing a gigantic piece of the puzzle and if you're just trying to be like, that doesn't matter because of whatever. No, shut the fuck up. Like no, that's a humongous aspect to anything will any asset you want to think about. If there isn't demand, then dilly squat, you know, Bitcoin in its initial days to where it is now, a lot of it has come from its demand. It's not like it's dramatically changed its functionality and its delivery nor is an asset like a house that different to what it was thirty years ago. What will change is underlying market, how much demand do you need for it, right? If you have a, if all of a sudden in, let's say New South Wales, the outflow of people leaving New South Wales is more than the incoming people. And so there's less people that actually need a house, or roof over their head, guess what?
Then there's not as much demand for the product itself, the prices go down. Like, that's very, very, you know, simple along that. There's other things that may happen, but I would say there's probably some other basic principles in financial spaces that if you are willfully ignorant about, you're delusional. Like that is a delusional aspect. So in the game sub examples and BBBY, there's probably some of those things that people were delusional about. But maybe, but again, like I said, you can also profit off financial delusion as long as you are aware of that delusion that's occurring. Yeah. Yeah. And
[00:59:38] Kyrin Down:
yeah, can you not profit from being financially diluted in the wrong sense? So you know, the Bill Gates and the like that they're stubborn, they don't want to admit they're wrong, you know, they seem to live so fucking arrogant that they'd, you know, already made up their mind. Perhaps there's some straight up differences of how they view reality is different. But yeah.
[01:00:01] Juan Granados:
To them individually, right, you'll you'll be listening are very, very wealthy. Like, okay, maybe if they did decide to go down the pro Bitcoin, they do become a little bit more wealthy. That's kinda like, so what? Like, does that really change? Like life that dramatically? Well, not even there are, you know, for the people they influence is perhaps, you know, but do they give a shit about that? I don't know. Like, do you give a shit that someone who's listening to right now, because sometimes we talk about Bitcoin, they will go and buy some Bitcoin. I don't think about it that often.
[01:00:32] Kyrin Down:
I don't view myself as a financial advisor. I think if you're writing financial advice, you know, Warren Buffett's famous annual investment to letters, annual letter to investors. Yeah. And that in that case, yeah, there's there's more responsibility than than I certainly feel for true. But but then again, for him, he's seen, you know, he's seen
[01:00:54] Juan Granados:
multiple decades versus things where you can still make money in what he is suggesting.
[01:00:59] Kyrin Down:
I think I think that what he's suggesting I think is you can't make money in bitcoin and you're gonna lose it all and that I disagree with. Yeah,
[01:01:07] Juan Granados:
I would probably say this would help the world if you, if you disagree with maybe not something that's like an obvious scam or something else, feel free to call that out. I think that I wouldn't be too saddened by that. But When it's something called the dust. Manchu. When it's like something that's either on the fence or there it's just it's a genuine conversation around such complex things, you're probably better off just stepping away from that particular conversation if you think that you have a negative thought about it. You could get into some conversations around NFTs where you can say look, maybe some of the top NFTs are still hanging around. You could say like well this one's a bit better than that one, but this one's worse than the other. I wouldn't mind the conversation of like, oh, yeah. This is better because of these reasons.
I don't think it's very worth it to have a conversation. Oh, yeah. But this one's bad because of it's like, yeah. I'd rather take step away from that one. I kinda see the similar thing with Bitcoin or other better, not better performing but better value, valued assets where it's like, if you really disagree with that particular one, actually I'd probably just prefer you don't put that point out there as opposed to trying to force people not to go down that path because it still has some sort of inherent value. Yeah. But maybe someone will have a different view of that. All right. Let's jump onto the aftermath of
[01:02:26] Kyrin Down:
what happens from financial delusions and when they're, when they started to being popped or Easy, easy, very easy. Yeah. You ready for it?
[01:02:34] Juan Granados:
All financial markets, lots of people lose money. Lots of people make money. Is it like, again, economy wise, from a, from a, from a broader, from a broad economy, right? If you're thinking about from the entire economy, the fact that the economy grows like the whole pie grows and shrinks and expands, there's a general expansion by way of inflation and the traditional fiat whole process. I guess in Bitcoin it's a limited amount of Bitcoin and that's how many Bitcoin it is, isn't expanding, the pie isn't getting bigger, it's the I guess the way that you're slicing it down and the people who are interacting with it and then that maps to the
[01:03:12] Kyrin Down:
whatever market model economic model is being used, whatever. But after financial bubbles, it's like, you're gonna lose some money, you're gonna make some money. You've skipped to the end and missed all the juicy stuff on. I'm gonna give people what they want. So the, you know, you see declines of 30 plus percent in a manner of weeks or months. Crypto is certainly higher for this. Typically exaggerated reports of suicides. You hear you hear about suicides, but like, I struggle to believe that they're all related to exactly that that that it's kind of like, you know, sorrow is a young Werther effect. You know, the when people start talking about suicides, more suicides happen because people are looking out for it. It's it's now I don't know the there's the I think the actual linkage is hard to prove that true. FDX goes down and all these people who are committing suicide are because of FTX. You know, it's just a nice thing to be able to point out and be like, oh, there's the link. That's the. Yeah, that's what it was before. Whereas I think it's usually a lot more things going on in people's lives that affect that huge fraud eventually gets untangled. So typically spending money from capital that isn't yours borrowed and happens after the bubble pops, but then run on effects of bankruptcies mount to other semi legit and even legit companies. So shout out to the 1920s Charles Ponzi and SBF for doing that.
Old heroes fall from grace. So speculators, owners, savvy businessmen, prestige companies lose big and become bankrupt, flee or go to jail. Here's one Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame. Eve lost a whole bunch of money and like his is like prestige as an author certainly went down after that, which is pretty funny. Pain is spread out past the speculators themselves. Governments capitulate and socialize the losses. So here's a pretty wild one. In 1847, Parliament in England, They suspended the bank act that they'd made just three years earlier, where three years earlier, they're like, we're not going to make you whole if you're speculating in XYZ, joint stock company. Yep, that's your loss, you're going to take it just three years later.
[01:05:36] Juan Granados:
They're going to bail out people.
[01:05:38] Kyrin Down:
Yep. It was it was so hilarious that they make this and then then just rescind it so quickly. And that's continued to this day. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it's because of hidden exposure where third or fourth order effect is enough to wipe out a solid, sustainable business. So, you know, when governments are eyeing up crypto, it's just going to bail out the governments if that goes down. So that'd be pretty funny. Everybody blames everybody. So no one comes out looking good at best neutral. And there's usually like tears of anger, disappointment, shame and woe. The moral reprisals and regulation to stop the activity of degenerate gamblers as they are known. 1968, Nixon bought them that.
So this is coming big time for AI. Like when when the the crypto slash AI bubble pops, I reckon there's going to be there's going to be a lot of, you know, pointing of fingers. And then the final one time heals all wounds and after a month, a year of life daily living like it goes on. I would like it's not the people have adapted. So the only
[01:06:47] Juan Granados:
of that, by the way, I the only one that I'm like, I wonder if I'm just alluded. But I really do go, is it going to be a pop for AI? Or as of the boy, is it going to be one of those like, we're going to just pop downwards and then we're going to settle into some sort of reality? Or is it going to pop super cycle upwards and just go even more extreme into the like not fear my I don't know if something like this will happen will the evolution in some of the tech and uses of AI even surprise us to where we are today where it's like, oh, you thought it was going to take ten years for 80% of the jobs to kind of go away.
Ah, it's six months. That would be some sort of level of, of not, I'm not talking like, financial like changeover where it's like, oh wow some companies are gonna pop really big, which they will, but it's a whole order of changeover to what do you do when basically everyone like let's just say 40% of people just order over a couple of months become jobless where people are genuinely not hiring them anymore because there's no need, like we can just replace you with something that's costing us cents in terms of energy basically. That level of shift at such a speed would prove ridiculous in some particular like financial aspects and in other ways it would not like in some ways bad impact in some ways great impact for particular companies. What would governments do to try sustain those sort of individuals? I don't know, there's some aspects I'm like, I think I'm deluding myself in something like that happening. It definitely dilutive man. There's gonna be bubbles and gonna be pops that that's not gonna change. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like my again, you know, more or less if you if someone out there is like kind of closer to some of these out there to give me an impression, tell me. But I've now seen personally personally seen two companies that are now laying off people in favor of AI usage and I've started to read of a lot more companies out there who are reducing the numbers. The big players, Meta, Alphabet, a few others, where they are forcefully reducing their numbers to increase the AI usage, especially in the developer front. Like, they're starting to get rid of developers in order to have one developer essentially man 20 AIs.
And if it just the rate of speed continues to go high, I kind of go like damn, one of the one, a personal observation that I've seen or whatever reason I get these all the time on Linkedin so maybe maybe it's I don't know why I literally don't know why. I get notifications all the time. It's specifically US people looking for jobs on LinkedIn, that maybe they get all the likes or the comments on that particular, follow me social media, LinkedIn. All of them are like, I've been trying to get a job for six months, eight months, ten months, nothing, no one wants to hire me. I keep a tip sent off 100 CVs at different companies, and all wants to hire me what's going on. And I was all these comments and people saying, you know, when you interview do this, you know, actually when you go do that, but generally a lot of those roles are developers, HR people, lawyers and I keep seeing this again and again and again on LinkedIn being like, I can't get a job, I can't find it. I'd love to see some stats on how many people are shifting to like looking for work, new work, something to that effect. Because my gut tells me, I reckon it's going to move way quicker than we expect. Where most, like a lot of companies are going to see this all of a sudden like, why in the hell would I be hiring someone and paying them $10 a month when I can pay $2.32 for the same role?
[01:10:23] Kyrin Down:
That's coming. I'm telling you that is coming. My gut tells me that those people I'd love to meet those people and be like, how can you not find any job in six to eight, nine, ten months of trying? In their profession, I want like because I think broadly you could find that job anywhere, I think.
[01:10:40] Juan Granados:
If I, when I start hearing that in person, like if I had a mate or something who said like, Hey, I'm Mate Mitchell. If he goes like, Hey, I'm in Accounting. I can no longer find a job in Accounting because no one's hiring anymore for that. It's just purely being outsourced to AI. That's when I go like, I mean, that's validated what I'm thinking. Like that's coming. It's not gonna have effects in the real world for a long time. That's my opinion. My call out here, this is my mere mortal light prediction for your home, end of twenty twenty six. I reckon this will be a news
[01:11:13] Kyrin Down:
out of the news big topic being like we have a problem you people are not getting like oh yeah but you just said there's going to be a super cycle so everything's going to be good right Like, well, financial assets, everything's going up. Good
[01:11:26] Juan Granados:
for the people who we will be good for? No, disagree. Not for the people who are not in the positions to profit from. Absolutely disagree. There's no way that
[01:11:36] Kyrin Down:
the if if news cycles are talking negative, we've got big problems and things like this and you think asset prices are still going to be going up and no way. Absolutely no way. More or less who we reckon is financially diluted. We'll find that in 2026.
[01:11:50] Juan Granados:
I got to finish
[01:11:51] Kyrin Down:
with how do you know if there's financial delusion in the air? It's you can see it in the people. And so Robert Downey's Wall Street card comes to mind and go check this up. Type in Robert Downey Wall Street. And so he was doing like this documentary and he visited Wall Street and he's like, if money is evil, then that building is hell. This is the most obnoxious group of money hungry, low IQ, high energy jackrabbit, fucking wannabe big time, small time shit talking, bothersome, irritating bunch of motherfuckers I have ever had to endure for more than five minutes. And it is I love that clip, man. It's a great clip. You see him in there getting like jostled around. There's this dude with two phones in his ears, like bumping into the like he literally bumps into the back of Robert Downey Jr. Yeah. No idea. Just fucking shouting into these two phones into his ears. It is fucking hilarious.
So good. So if you're in that sort of environment, you know, there's some financial delusion going on.
[01:12:50] Juan Granados:
There you go. Any more lines? You tell us at home what other financial delusions are coming our ways. We're gonna partake in our conversation around where you think we are right or wrong. Feel free to do it at the Discord channel. Plenty of conversation you can do. Yeah. Come join there. We're much more active there than we have been in the past. Correct. Comments, obviously, since we're any comments, I don't know if there's any on the live at the moment. Just looking this up. I think there was just some eye emojis from
[01:13:15] Kyrin Down:
C4 system three one graph three. Good. Oh, shit. They're setting up eye emojis. Should we look into this? What does it mean? Should we look into this? I know.
[01:13:25] Juan Granados:
They're watching us. Beyond that, again, send through some boostograms, go and utilize the platforms out there that allow you to support the value for value model.
[01:13:34] Kyrin Down:
There's, Fountain, TrueFrame, Samsung, There's plenty out there. Yeah. If you have a Alby hub connecting to those ones is what you need. Yep.
[01:13:43] Juan Granados:
Leave it there for now. New Morning Lights. Hope you're well wherever you are in the world. As always, Sundays, 9AM, chilling Eastern Time when we go live. Yep. Join me for the next one. For now, bye now. Carry on. Good.
Welcome Mere Mortalites to another episode here of the mere mortals musings live 9AM Australian Eastern Standard Time on a Monday, Sunday, Sunday. This is the February 9. You've got Kyrin here on this side. You've got Juan on the other side. And today we're gonna be talking about some delusions.
[00:00:24] Juan Granados:
Financial delusions. Delusions. Financial financial. Some crypto will pop up in there of course,
[00:00:29] Kyrin Down:
but we'll try to avoid it being again, just pure crypto. Yeah. I I we've talked about that a little bit recently. So the the reason for this was a couple of reasons. One, I still had some leftover notes from the Devil Take the Hindmost book. Do you have a lot of notes from that book? I'd so much, man, as I was reading it and creating the notes as I tend to do when I'm doing book reviews, I already knew like, man, this is going to cover multiple things, whatever this is. Like, there's so many notes here. So part of it's that the finale to our unintentional financial focus over the last couple of weeks, I think is how I describe this and most of January, I think we talked like financial things. Yeah. Yeah.
You know, a lot of it was because of this book. It was a really fucking good book. So there was a couple of other things that occurred for me recently. And one of them is I've been diving into more like documentary style YouTube channels if I can find them. So like four thousand and thirty minute plus videos, where there's, it's not exactly journalism, because they're not going out on their own that sometimes they might be doing like some interviews with people,
[00:01:41] Juan Granados:
like a Coffeezilla style. It's seem like less than that, like less less journalistic than that, but
[00:01:49] Kyrin Down:
they'll still put in some efforts. Okay. So the there was this one guy called James Jani, j a n I, and he had a couple of videos on the James stop and then another one Bed Bath and Beyond, which I hadn't really dived into before. I didn't know much of. And boys are some crazy delusion stuff. I think it's BBY. BBY. BBY. BBY. BBY. Is the ticker. That's the ticker. Why it. And a couple of other people have invested some friends, my brother in some things which were obviously financially diluted. And that was the thing that kept coming up in these videos was there's delusion, you can have delusions about what real life is your own grandeur or things like that. But these people were like, there was a specific type related to finances.
And so it was it was almost like you could they were so certain of an event happening that they're willing to bet on it essentially. And that's what investing, speculating, gambling, the spectrum, as we learned from the book. And yeah, I wanted to just dive into this. Why? Why is this kind of niche of financial delusions? And what can we learn from it? I guess?
[00:03:01] Juan Granados:
Okay, I'll take a little spin that you said there about like there's investing, there's, gambling, something I've been listening to recently from particular individual, Tom Bilyeu and his statement around it, which at first I was like, this kind of seems weird, but now that I'm like reflecting on it, kind of went, it's all gambling. It's all gambling and then it just depends how diluted you are about how that gamble goes because even if you're investing, as surefire as you think it might be, property investing, bonds, it's still a gamble. Like you're still gambling, you're still putting forward some money for the hope of a return. Yeah. Now the risk variation is very different, of course. So I would say, bonds or real estate, more traditional, illiquid type of markets, I would say that you're still gambling there in that you're expecting that it's going to go up but that's not assured but there's a very low level of risk there of that going pear shape and if it does, there's also some limitation on the downside of that.
The places where you can get really, really heavily polluted are in very liquid markets where either there's sole individuals that can move the whole entire market or there's other forces at play that are beyond just the, like effective economic markets that have a play in it that just changes things and then you are deluding yourself and how much you can do or the return that you're expecting and then the gamble days like what I guess we would associate it a more true gamble. So I've started to, I had first rebelled against it and now I'm like, you know what? I kind of like it, it's all a gamble. It's all a gamble, be immortalized. Whatever you're doing, it's all a gamble. You think you're putting money on on a property or on shares or in crypto, you're gambling, you're gambling. But it just depends on your level of, I guess, risk and assurity of what's going to come to fruition based on asked or expected, things into the future but also how much you have control over as well. Again, if you have a business, if I was to put a million dollars into a business and it's a gamble, let's see if it works, but there's a lot of it that you control. I would say that's a very controlled gamble, right? There's a lot of factors that you are able to control versus buying some shares. Again, it's a gamble and you have less control over what's going on apart from maybe buying the products or influencing it in some other way. Yeah, I think I think you're using the word gamble in the in a very loose sense. Yeah, look I originally found distaste in the way that the gamble. However, if you look up the definition of gambling that I shouldn't take Tumblr at the absolute face front, But if you look at the definition of gambling, it does actually fit within that constraint. I'll bring up the definition. I saw this Reddit post recently where it was this mom, and she's she's talking about a child. And she's like,
[00:05:47] Kyrin Down:
my child is saying things which I think are wrong, but I don't know how to explain they're wrong. Basically, it was around probability. And so the child was like she was explaining like, you know, there's a 90% chance of this happening. And the kids like, Yeah, that's okay. But there's a 50 there's like a fiftyfifty outcome of whether it happens or not. So it's like, he was using the term fiftyfifty as in like, the, like horse racing or something like this horse is going to come first ninety percent chance that it doesn't. But he'd be like, Yeah, but there's a fiftyfifty outcome of if the horse either comes first or it doesn't come first. And there's like equal weighting of that. And she's trying to I think she she didn't really know about binary of like it's either a yes or a no. But because the kid kept saying fifty fifty she she just like couldn't understand that he wasn't talking about probability because he's a kid. He doesn't know shit about binary. So but he's right in expressing yes, the event either occurred or it didn't occur.
So I kind of feel like this is how you're using gambling. It's like he's using the word he's sort of right, but it's not.
[00:07:00] Juan Granados:
It's not. I'd love to hear him more often than this because it took me a while to like ingest and and become more of a sub definition. The definition of gamble is play games of chance for money. Okay. So, you know, is it a game of money if you're putting money into the share market? I guess you could define it as a game. Is it a chance for money? Another one is to take action in the hope of a desired result. Take risky action in the hope of a desired result. So well then what does risky mean? Yeah, so in any case, in any case, so I think that there's there's the dilution of finance tends to be towards the more riskier the more untethered to your own actions that you can find and you are when you have the language of yeah, I really hope this goes up or what, you know, I think this will go up because of whatever variation, I guess there's more introduction of delusion because it's either outside of the scope of field or you have less control over it or you're purely just hoping on some random past experience for something else to happen. I don't think the liquidity
[00:07:57] Kyrin Down:
matters that much in terms of financial delusions. Like if you find someone who's financially diluted, I don't think it really matters if there is a really open market for whatever they're diluted into. And we'll get into some examples soon. So it's not all just airy fairy. But I think there is something kind of related to that, which is the time length, which which happens. And if they're a real short term focused, then whether whether it's like super liquid, they see whatever they're in into drops by 40%. And they've got a short term time focus, they're gonna sell like, there's no that they're probably not diluted about the, the reality of whatever it is that they're holding, because, like, immediate results are telling them they're wrong. So what I tend to see with a couple of these delusions that I'll get into there's even though there was a liquid market for them, they were just playing in stocks.
They were still deluded about the like the time length of holding it and what that would do for them. And so even though it was going down because their time length was years, if not decades, they did to infinity, they were able to hold and like bear the brunt of the pain. So there is something about the time length and I'm not sure if that changes in so let's say you buy property in Mozambique and you're, you know, it's probably super liquid. Who's gonna buy it from you? Maybe someone in Mozambique, but you know, you could if you bought it here, and you somehow have some registration of it here in Australia, no one's gonna buy it from you here. You know, are you diluted if you think that that still has real value? And you can't realize it?
Yeah, I'm not I'm not so sure about it. Ah, yeah.
[00:09:52] Juan Granados:
Just as you were describing it, then I kind of go, what's your, I mean what's the underlying principles that makes you think that you're not diluted? So again, even in that example of buying a house in Mozambique. At the forefront, kind of sounds diluted but if you really question that, is there a rational or first principles thinking on like why that might be? Now this person might come out and be like well, yeah looking at the trajectory of Mozambique and its population and its economical growth, actually it's the fourth fastest growing market there is and in about ten-fifteen years I could actually see a return that's ridiculously higher than here. Okay, then maybe it isn't diluted, maybe it's a reality at play, maybe it isn't though. Sorry, but unless someone like actually provided that information, they're kind of be like, well, sounds like you're diluted if you have no quite clear view. Same with, so because sometimes in a, say, a company or a business, someone's running a business and they go, I'm hoping from, I want to go from 1,000,000 annual turnover to 10,000,000 annual turnover.
Wonderful! And then it kind of just go, yeah, it's kind of like like not the sameness but like it's it's going to be lucky. Like it just if it's going to happen man it was just by luck or you just exerted so much effort to make it happen and whatnot. And so maybe at the end of that ten year, at the end of the year you do make 10,000,000 I don't think you'd associate, you were still delusional and man, you were just lucky and there's a lot of hard work that came to it. Yeah. Versus, you know, same thing. Someone says I'm not a million, I want to get $10,000,000 but they lay out all of these foundational thinking and maybe the way that they can do it and they're broken it down.
Now, the same amount of luck has to kind of play out for that to happen along with the effort and the planning but then I wouldn't think them to be as delusional in it because there's more fundamental thing that's going to it. So I think that also different, even though it's the exact same thing, like the exact same thing has happened, but in one aspect, our human influence has been, oh, you've thought about this more, hence, you're not as delusional, even though the rest of the market is exactly the same. Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:53] Kyrin Down:
Let me jump into the GameStop Bed Bath Beyond because there's a real clear example of what financial delusion is. So, a good video to watch, as I mentioned, James Janney, one of them is called the Cult of the Dead Stock And then the other one is either a prequel or a sequel to that. So you'll find it from related links in there. And there's a couple of things you note in there right at the start, the cult and what he shows in this kind of investigation is very cult like behavior. And so essentially, for those who don't know, GameStop emerged from, I guess, the YouTube slash Reddit of this guy, Roaring Kitty, who also had the moniker deep fucking value on Reddit.
And he laid out this thesis of why he thought GameStop was actually a good investment at $3.05 dollars And he actually put a lot of thought into it. He had no rational analysis of I think it's undervalued because of this XYZ reason, you know, financial data to back it up. If he was wrong, it wasn't he wasn't deludedly wrong. Like he had he had there was a reasonable sanity of reasons of why he was he was investing in this. And the thing with GameStop and sorry, the WallStreetBets subreddit is they they kind of incentivize the wildness there is, there's, I heard some people saying recently like why why do people invest in some things even though there's, there's like a really good chance of it going wrong. And they know there's a really good chance of it going wrong. And it's because you can actually get some social capital in this sub. Yeah, you're posting a $50 loss,
[00:13:45] Juan Granados:
and you'll get all these lights.
[00:13:48] Kyrin Down:
It might not be financial value you're getting. But you're, you're getting some sort of value from doing that. And especially even like showcasing your loss, like who in history is proudly go on about showcasing their losses, like no one ever yet. Now there is a community where like, we're basically doing flex and be saying like, I lost this much. Yep. So there's weird, you know, on unintuitive examples of behavior going on in there already where you're like, okay, that doesn't make sense. But in the context of the subreddit, it makes sense. Long story short, GameStop, people started investing in it and then there's kind of cult developed around Roaring Kitty. He was doing live streams and he was showcasing once again his data, but now he was, you know, hyping it up a bit more. You saw he he went from just like kind of clean-cut looking into the camera, you know, well presented to fucking glasses on wearing a bandanna.
I'm not sure if he was drinking in them as well, but I seem to recall him having a drink or two. So it became more of a show. And this this idea developed called the MOAS. Do you know what the MOAS is? The mother of all short squeezes. Yes, correct. Yep. And so short squeeze is for is for when there's people shorting a company and you as a kind of conglomerate group and of retail individuals can buy up enough stock so that there's no stock for them to buy back. And so it's kind of like a an artificial pump of the stock in some essence where is it artificial if everyone just agrees to hold it and then therefore there's scarcity and therefore it has value? Yeah. You know, artificial is a hard word to to grasp nowadays, especially with AI.
[00:15:40] Juan Granados:
And is it is it actually artificial? Yeah, I mean, this is the thing that some people will say, right? Because like, all you know, is an artificial generator when you go for the short squeeze. But the reality of it is, that is how the whether it's stocks or other things because you're going to have a buyer and seller on either end. That is just normal market. It's how they turn out. Exactly. So it's not it's not really The addition of the internet subreddit cult
[00:16:02] Kyrin Down:
group behavior is is a little bit different, but But again, it that that emerged naturally. I don't think there was anyone in that subreddit group being like, let's fucking make a cult. No. No. But I think it's it's the it's
[00:16:13] Juan Granados:
the common, like, question of its value and price. And the price is determined by the interest that is seen by an individual or a group. So again, yes it created a short squeeze but it was because there was just a lot of interest in the buying portion of it. This is the same thing that's happened with tons of different assets, this happens all the time which is just you've got more buyers and you've got sellers and there's more pressure there so you're just gonna have one thing going on. So yeah, that short squeeze and there's been lots of other short squeezes like that, that particular short squeeze I think was all the hedge funds that are holding all those shorts basically got to the point that they were like, oh man, we have to cover our bases. Yeah. And I think it was like a 2000%
[00:16:47] Kyrin Down:
increase in GameStop's share price and everyone just like, yeah. So it went from $3 up into hundreds, essentially. And a lot of people, Roaring Kitty, made a lot of money from this. Now there was a lot of people who also didn't because this gained widespread attention at the time. And then even after the time, you know, I'm still watching videos years after the event now and the MOA, so they're short squeezes. This has been done before. People know about it. It's a common thing in financial markets, but the MOA was that was something I'd never heard of before and it was only watching this video that really made me go, Oh shit, this is a whole nother level of financial delusion. So do you know what some of the people actually believe? What would the MOAS would bring about how it would occur? And okay, so so essentially, there's there was like, okay, we're gonna short squeeze these hedge funds, but they started to develop, what you would start to say is irrational logic behind what hedge funds do, how the financial markets work and things like this.
And so they started to be like, oh, okay, there's they're actually doing illegal things behind the scenes and that there's a short selling more than there is actual stock. So and I'm not sure if this is technically possible or not. I'm inclined to believe no, that so essentially, short selling is where you I won't get technically would be able to feel if you're leveraging it. If it's unlevered multiplier, then you should technically be able to do beyond the shares that exist. Yeah. It's I don't know if there's financial regulations in place to stop you doing that. Yeah. I don't know. Probably not. Probably not. Because, you know, if there's leverage, how come you just can't lever up and buy more stock than there is actual stock? You know, that sort of deal. So I have the feeling that this is the sort of thing where I'd go, there's probably some sort of backstop here where there is some rules saying, hey, you can't do this, but it doesn't matter. People in the subreddit were not believing that. So they were going, holy shit, you know, if we can get this short squeeze really going, they're going to have to buy up, you know, so much stock that they're going to be coming for, like, my individual pieces of stock. Like that's how much stuff they're going to have to buy back.
They can't just use what's on the current open market. They need to literally buy up everything. So the MOAS was if we just hold on this short squeeze will not only like drive the price to thousands, tens of thousands make us all millionaires like, hey, that's what we're all in this for, right? GME to the moon sort of deal. It's going to go to an it's not going to go to the moon, it's going to go to an infinity. And so what this will do is it's going to break the whole financial system, they are going to have to company, they're going to have to like go to the government for money, the government's not going to be able to print enough money, it's going to cause widespread like all debts, everything will be liquidated, to try and buy back the stocks that I hold.
And, you know, it went into full on prepper. What are you going to do when the MOAAS hits? Because the whole financial you're going to be filthy rich, of course. But you're going to be the one of the richest people on earth. But all financial markets are going to break everything. And it's like, it's hard to know if they're just larping like live action role playing. This is fun. Or if they're actually believing it. And this is the question that comes up with a lot of cults. Did they actually believe it? Or was this There would definitely be a part of them that would would have believed that for sure. I think that's how humanity tends to go. There's, there's certainly like, probably say, like low IQ individuals who will be all in there's some people who are making a financial profit from things that are like off to the side. And so like, let's say you are a prepper, you start proponing the the MOAS theory, and you're also selling bunkers and prepping equipment to all the holders of GME. There's an incentive there for you a financial incentive outside of the MOAS for you to be doing this and holding GME. So that, that was where I was just like, oh, this is, this is like straight up financial delusion.
You think you're going to cause the entire financial system to collapse just because you hold GME and you're not going to sell it even when it gets into tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Nah, just upload it to today.
[00:21:25] Juan Granados:
GME obviously didn't go over it, did you? No, it didn't. It's still actually above those prices of those, you know, pre whatever it was, 2021 or whatever to 24 US dollars that I just checked in. It got up to $81 80 1 US dollars is what it got from. Whereas $3 whatever all $3 coming to $81 US dollars at the top, but it's still $24 So technically a lot of them made a lot of money still, like it still went quite up and above. I have no idea what the short seller market looks like on that particular one. But yeah, that's interesting. And they did force a lot of hedge funds to exit out of their short selling. Yeah, I do believe there was one hedge fund that actually There was one of those or like something happened back to them. So they did take an effect, but it wasn't a delusional, we we're going to break the entire system type of level. No, no.
[00:22:11] Kyrin Down:
The addition onto this is like, okay, you can look at GME and you'd be like, okay, this is, you know, there's a bit of delusion there, but there's probably a small subset. These are people who got in probably late, you know, at that peak. Yeah. 80, 80 ish, 70 ish dollars And now they're on the way down. And they're just like, fuck, I've lost so much money that I've already put into this. I don't want to feel the pain of actually having this loss. I'd rather just believe in the theory that it will be worth more someday, rather than the financial pain of actual realized losses. So that one I can kind of understand.
The other video was about BBY BBB. And the this is for Bed Bath and Beyond. Another company that was very similar to GameStop, and that it was in a kind of declining industry didn't have good revenues, things like that. Like it's a company that if you just looked at it as a whole, you're like, it's not doing so well. It's in a bit of a spot of bother. Now, the same guy who took over GME when it was in its kind of crazy stage, Ryan Cohen, he, he took over this company as well. He bought a bunch of shares and became CEO and the GameStop people are like, well, let's go. Let's go. Let's fucking go. So essentially, another cult developed probably a smaller one, but with the hardcore elements who were more invested into the underlying things. So they have GameStop because so much people made money from it. They kind of hailed this guy Ryan Cohen is like he turned around GameStop like it's amazing, fortunate revival of the company. Like he's a genius. So So when he takes over another one, they're like, it's gonna happen again.
You know, GameStop two point zero Here we go. BBY. This is where it gets into a whole other levels of delusion where they start. Now, this guy doesn't really do podcasts or interviews or anything like that. But he does tweet a lot. And so, with like BBY, more bad and bad news was coming out like, oh, okay, you know, they're going to have to close down stores, things like this. There was just once again, like another subset of people, one dude would like go out to headquarters where one of the I think it was the CFO or CTO committed suicide jumped out of a building, right after like, it was announced they were going into bankruptcy or something like that.
Was it directly related to that probably had some influence of him. But you know, likely he had other things going on in his life as well. And people were like going out to stores harassing the doorman to get into there and be like, did he actually die? Was he even real? Is he still alive? This sort of deal? They started analyzing Ryan Collins tweets for like hidden meaning meanings. And so when he put like an eye emoji on a shopping cart full of food or something, they'd be like, Oh, this means he's like, he's watching out for us and he's looking after our bags and things like this. He wrote a children's book, Ryan Cohen, for some reason, they started analyzing like Biggity Bear and how Biggity Bear is actually like referencing to like, you know, the Bed Bath and Beyond and this sort of stuff. And they just went into ridiculous levels, to the point where it went bankrupt.
And then it's like, okay, there's a set date where all the shares are just going to be taken off exchanges. And days before they're still being like, okay, but this event could occur, which means there's going to be a revival. So still don't lose hope yet. You know, your shares are still going to be worth something. So even when it's all
[00:26:11] Juan Granados:
gone. Crazy.
[00:26:12] Kyrin Down:
Yeah. And they had similar characters. There was a guy who was live streaming. I think his name was like PP or something like that. And once again, there were other characters who were obviously kind of grifting off of this. He PP himself was he was making money by people donating into the show and stuff like this. The whole thing was just made me go, how do you get to such a point where you're you're at the point where you're just so deluded of what reality is that I and it and it didn't have any of these aspects of like, sure, there was a cult leader who was kind of charismatic, but it wasn't in person. It was all it was all via the Internet.
It didn't have a lot of the other social things you see in cults where they're locked into a certain compound or something like that. So they so there's no escape financially or physical escape as well. So it seemed like a voluntary. Delusion to culture. And delusion in some sense where it was it was just a psychological effect of losing money was probably the only thing. I I was holding them all together. Yeah, look, maybe if that was a real psychologist, I could go into it here and be like, okay, the financial portion wasn't actually that big. It was more about being part of a community of making friends of things like that. I think the money aspect would have been a big piece of it, Brian. It also might have been so heavily related. That's, you know, we're going to the moon. The posts were all about improving your life and making financials.
[00:27:50] Juan Granados:
Also, the ticker was BBBY. Oh, okay. Sorry. I'll look at BBBY and I was like, why is it the top price of that? Yeah. I didn't
[00:27:58] Kyrin Down:
Between the two of us. Triple B Y. We managed to Yeah.
[00:28:03] Juan Granados:
Okay. Let's take a pause. We'll do some boostagrams, in the boostagram land and we'll get back into it. Sure. But I don't think we've got any boost to grams in terms of the actual messages. However, a big call out to lithium. I see him. I see him who's been pumping through the streaming. Is it is it streaming? Yeah. It would come through the streaming from true fans. Looks like they've been basically pumping through 30 sets per ten minutes or per minute.
[00:28:29] Kyrin Down:
Yeah. So like huge thanks. That's a lot coming through there from like, see him. Martin Lindas Cook. So yeah, we don't see the streaming normally. It's just when people are streaming through on Truefans. So I'm not not able to see that normally. But yeah, very much appreciated. So all the streamers out there who are the, you know, the hidden lurkers who don't like to message a big shout out to you. Thank you very much for supporting the show. We I see the numbers when I do my quarterly reviews. And so we very much appreciate your your support to the show financial measure. And if you want to do that yourself, two links down below meremortalspodcast.com/support and then also the PayPal link.
Right. And also just note to everyone, I have changed a lot of our yes linkages. So it's mere mortals pods on Twitter now. Yep, it's mere mortal podcasts on Instagram and TikTok. And I can't get a discord invite link that says that unless we get some boosts. So if you also want to boost our discord, give it a and when I say boost, I mean, like, that's the discord language. Oh, gotcha. Yeah, like there's a boost boost thing. Yep, boost diamond, whatever it is. So we need three of those to be able to do invite links which have mere mortals podcasts on it as well. Gotcha, okay. We'll see. Maybe changes to the website sometime in the future. Correct, yeah. There's some 2FA in it and got to the Yeah. Main models podcast.
[00:29:55] Juan Granados:
No, with a just Oh, with a little T and there will be an S to come. For the website. Correct.
[00:30:01] Kyrin Down:
One last shout out on the, the GameStop stuff or two actually. There's a guy, Maratz Rants, which was really, really funny because he was all in on the GameStop. But then he was one of the biggest caller adders of the BBBY thing. And so there was a dude who straddled both worlds where he's like, this is the most ridiculous shit I ever like. You're looking into tweets or Roncaller, like he's not going to save you. But then still to this day, it was like, I'm buying one GME stock every single day. So there's there's there's, you know, methods to the madness as well.
I don't know how you actually square that. Yeah. It reminds me of my colleague I once worked with who I was baiting with some conspiracy theories because I knew I knew he liked him and he was he was fucking delusional. He wasn't financially diluted. Maybe generally, it was just straight up diluted. And I was baiting him one time and I was like, he was all into nine eleven. I don't know if you'd call this a conspiracy theory, but certainly like young Earth, you know, Earth is 6,000 years old sort of thing whilst working as a like almost as a geologist in the mind. Like you could literally see this rock face and the different stratum and shit. Some highway. With illusioning out to like. Yeah. Yeah.
He was very good at manipulating facts and reasons to suit his agenda. And I was like, oh, yeah. You know, I've always been partial to the moon landing one. And man, he fucking ripped into me. You're the dumbest. That's so fucking stupid, man. Have you looked into the like? And he was just ripping on me for for bringing this up. And I was I was baiting him into it and instead he ended up turning it on me and be like, you're so fucking dumb and just was like, wow, man, this is crazy. I didn't expect that. Full blind delusion. You mentioned it before.
Well, actually, here's a question for you. Is there any financial beliefs you've had that you would say you were deluded upon or that you were you can be straight up wrong in your gambling or your bets, but is there anything where you've been deluded by?
[00:32:16] Juan Granados:
One aspect I think I would say would be at the very my younger years, I think I was diluted into how much net benefit financially properties brought other than that at the very initial, like we're talking now, like twelve years ago or something, I think initially the, the assessment of properties as a financial asset, I was diluted in that, oh, yeah, you know, there's with capital gains and rental gains. And it wasn't for a few years. Two times the gains. Yeah, until like kind of the determinant they're like, well, when you actually take into account all the other costs and at least here in Australia, the way that it's set up, there's extra taxation things that you have to pay and once you reach certain thresholds other taxations that kind of come into play. There was again not a big delusion but there was some more realizations of reality of like oh okay yeah there's some other offsets that happened here and maybe I was deluding myself of what the eventual, multipliers or growth perspectives were in that area. It's still not a bad thing, but I think I was diluted in that aspect of it, of its multiples. The other one I think financially I would say that I was always alluded in was NFTs and the very second I'm talking 2020, '20 '20 '1 type of years. I was very deluded in that I was holding very good 6 figure NFT bags type of deal and being like, doesn't matter. This is going to go 7 figures, 8 figures. That looking back and I'm like, okay, one today kind of realizes on You can go back and look at those as well. We've got those recorded on there. So I think the delusion there was looking at it from today's perspective is to some point now that I've gone through it in a personal experience, a lot of markets very much depend on demand versus actual capacity to deliver to that. And that looking at that now, I was like, okay, very much the demand was at a very at a peak and capacity or the availability to the market was starting to like go up and up and up and up because if you remember for NFTs around those years there was things on the market but there wasn't that many and it started becoming this hyperbolic where everyone was creating NFTs and pursuing projects so the amount of things in the market started to increase at the same time as probably the demand started to decrease and that sort of crossover is no good. I think with today's knowledge, I would have seen that and gone, oh, crap, time to start, like, don't be deluded. This is not just gonna multiply 100 times over from here. It could have under very, very rare unique circumstances. I didn't eventually. So like CryptoPunk, you know,
[00:34:58] Kyrin Down:
if you'd bought one of them, you'd still would have been up in 5 figure territory for a long time. Oh, for sure. And yes, you if you're up in 7 figures, and you're like, I could, you know, if I sell this, I'll never be able to get it back in again, if it goes to 8. There's there's Yeah, there's a lot of my phone and, and things like that, which how would I put it? Yeah, standard things that you'll see in financial markets everywhere, where it's like,
[00:35:33] Juan Granados:
short term bursts of energy. Yeah, I think my general financial dilutions I've seen progress is that not if you're looking at it more so statistically, not everything is going to be as high returning as I think it's actually going to be. But on the inverse as well, I think I am more comfortable at aiming for the items that are going to be the ten one hundred multipliers that have a lower probability but that I can input maybe less capital towards for that to potentially happen than to bother with the two five x multipliers That type of mentality. But that's a little bit different. I guess. Yeah, you know, I think there might be a reverse
[00:36:19] Kyrin Down:
Peter Thiel quote here, which could be useful, which is yonder. Yeah, underestimate what you can do in what is that one year or overestimate, sorry, overestimate what you can do in one year and underestimate in five year, actually, no, it's it's basically the same thing. You overestimate what you can make financially in a year. But you probably underestimate what you could do over five years if you'd if you just like,
[00:36:46] Juan Granados:
lock in. Well, so this is all I remember this. I remember this very well, when I was 20 years, either 25 or 26. I remember putting together like a five year plan by the time I was 30. So that was four or five years of financially. And I remember this very well in that two years into it. My idea of the progress towards that, I was like, Oh my God, I was so deluded like what the hell? There's no way you are far behind. I was so far behind. How is this even gonna happen? This is just ridiculous. Again, in that time frame, it felt like I was diluted financially on what I was thinking.
Again, if and it very much depends on timeline, if that is your timeline, yeah, you're going to be diluted more than likely in what you're thinking you have to, on those shorter scales, probably have to pull back for the reality. But then on a slightly longer timescale, I remember hitting when I was 31. I remember looking back at that and went Holy shit! Like I actually went flying past that number and my anticipated, because I had like a, you you know, what was the per month income that needs to be coming in to satisfy what I want. I remember that time when I was twenty fivetwenty six looking at him going, I'll look, let's just make like a laughable thought and let's just say it's yeah something like this number that'd be pretty funny. Then comes you know whatever it was five six years later and not only was that achieved it was like laughably easy achieved. I went, Woah! That which I probably would have thought was the man I'm deluding myself financially now I was like, Oh no, that was pretty rudimentary that was gonna happen.
And the opposite, which was more around the, total assets at a shorter time frame, that one was the one that was actually diluting myself. But then if I was 25, 20 six, I thought it was like the opposite way around. So yeah, be very watchful I think of the timelines you give certain things because yeah, the shorter scales, you will financially dilute yourself more than likely. On longest, longest scales, you won't. Like that's like a, I've now heard it a lot of times and I've experienced it a lot. Yeah. And man's just basically explaining the, you know, we like to think linearly.
[00:38:48] Kyrin Down:
We're going to just go up in a kind of straight gradual line. Correct. But he's wearing the banana shirt at the moment. And instead that whole theory is basically like compounding, compounding, compounding and then it just shoots up because of the compounding effects more than anything else. Correct. Correct. Correct. The my financial delusions, I would say I had two ish. One was, I could beat the market. I'm better than the fucking market, I can beat the market. And so when I was investing in stocks, I was reading financial reports and picking out ones. And I think I think I knew I could use my specialized mining knowledge to get a bit of a leg up.
No, no, not good. You know, I read the intelligent Vesta, I tried my best. I had some very rudimentary metrics of measuring these things. After and I mentioned this recently after selling all the stock, so I had a clean slate, I could look at all the data, I would have been much better off financially if I just bought and held the end market index fund Vanguard the entire time. I didn't do too badly below so you know, it's not like I was fucking crashing and burning. And overall, I still did pretty financially well out of investing in stocks, certainly much better than holding cash. The problem was, I certainly was deluded in that thinking I'm going to be the market buying all these things. Now I look back and I'm like, goddamn, I wasted a lot of time reading financial reports, which I didn't need to and I didn't enjoy doing that either. So that was a waste of time. The other one was,
[00:40:26] Juan Granados:
See, actually just interesting on that. I guess it's very much depends on individuals as well. So as much as you call out that, you know, you did that and you read a lot of financial reports and like, like, you know, that was a waste of time. I guess there are probably other individuals listening to the knowledge of me and more likes. I would say because I did that when I was younger, it actually has played out a lot of ways in the fact that I do now. So whether it was like, if I'm looking to buy a business and I've probably looked at fifteen, fifteen different businesses I was looking to buy and gone through the entire like financial reports or existing businesses that we're doing.
The fact that I'm able to like read those financial reports is a lot because I did that when I was younger with a lot of other companies. I'm like, oh yeah, I can see and read and not on an accounting detailed level but I can understand what's going on even more so now with AI. Like you just need to know what to ask it basically for a lot of those things. But I actually went, I'm really glad I did that. Like that was a great payout for doing that when I was younger. Yeah. See for me, I have no interest in that, you know, businesses and all those things.
[00:41:27] Kyrin Down:
That don't interest me. Yeah. The other one was, I did have a stonk shout out to CMC Chinese Magnesium Corporation. Yeah. This was more a recommendation from my dad. So he was the one who was probably more financially diluted than I in terms of what this company could do and how it was run, basically was ending up I don't know what you'd call it probably close to white collar crime in terms of the actions of the directors and essentially like they hoarded a bunch of money from Australians and the promise of the largest singly vertically integrated magnesium producer in in the world.
And it was being developed in China. And this was like in the era of like, Chinese manufacturing, starting to become more about like quality rather than quantity, I guess, and some sort of thing. And they just flee some money. And apparently, they're all living in Singapore now or something, the directors of this. So good. Yeah. But in any way, this I had the stock on my, on my, technically, it was still in the ASX for a while, at some point it disappeared. And I still had it on my own internal streets. And at some point, I'm like, I think I can just legally lock this in as a loss now. Like, it's so it's a liquid. There's no there's no do it. Do I still legally own any of this? I have no idea. Maybe I still do but Let me, let me put on my,
[00:42:56] Juan Granados:
Machiavellian hat on. Okay. I mean, I'll just finish reading the $48 of power. So, where can you profit off financial delusions as well? Right. Because I feel like I have profited off some financial delusions. So if you can power in that is that if you can see what financial delusions are kind of like GameStop, BBBY, BBBY and a few others, you can profit off that financially. My brother did. Yeah, my brother made money and
[00:43:22] Kyrin Down:
I like he made money from SafeMoon on the in crypto, which is like, like in 2021
[00:43:29] Juan Granados:
is run. And
[00:43:31] Kyrin Down:
that was just straight up scam. I remember him explaining to me the liquidity pool scenario, how this dips in here. And I remember it being like, this is so fucking dumb. And I can't do it himself. Yeah. Now I'm the biggest of the Safemoon tattoo in the chest. And he made money and like. Good put in, you know, put in hundreds throughout and brought out thousands, multiple thousands, if not getting into the 10,000 sort of range. And then he recently showed me a screenshot. He made money from GameStop as well. I didn't even know who bought it and he made, you know, like a 20% profit from it. So I'm sure he was financially diluted on whatever was happening, but he also had some sort of inherent thing in him, which was like cut losses as not even cut losses, take wins. Take wins. And unfortunately, another listener of the show, Cole, is he's kind of the opposite. He had AMC and, yeah, the only benefit from him was he lost 69%.
So nice, funny number. But,
[00:44:37] Juan Granados:
not, not didn't didn't get to take any games. Yeah. But like for me personally with there was there's three clear ones, but two where there was a an old shed, which was a it's called Renigen lithium. Okay. Now that still exists. And I was I began buying it because I was slightly financially diluted on what the promise of it was. I do believe at the time I was buying it at around dollar something dollar 40 dollar 50. So it was something to do with lithium right? Correct and it was like I had this and helium and I was just diluted back again. Read the documents. So much Helium. So much Helium on the planet and they had like the and again there's a lot of like hearsay what they find but I got caught up in the hype of it. Now what is this hype coming from? Like you're reading ASR? I found it from both some news sources but also like individual people who were kind of calling it out. Okay. That also had a bit of a following and the interesting thing that happened was I ended up buying it at a good time and it sort of started creeping up but I was able to spot that it was a financial dilution for many earlier on so then I had the privilege to sell out at a really nice top value and then got to see the demise of this because in the reality hit of oh they don't have as much helium and actually there's all these other issues and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So then I got to participate and then go oh I just profited well from my financial dilution and then similarly to how you were talking about with Magnesium there was both a magnesium company and a sand company, MGU and ELT, that I both was able to see the same behavior of financial dilution. So like kind of sitting on the outside, I was able to watch people go, oh, this is going to achieve this, is going to achieve that. So at the time I was like daily checking stocks and what people were doing and as soon as there was a bit of a proliferation towards a particular one, I would go like, cool, that's my little ride, I'll go on it knowing full well that's gonna go up slightly and it will peter off at whatever sort of transit and then people will kind of come off the back of it going up and continue to do buy on the way down. And I went, I've seen this now a couple of times, get in, watch as it goes up, take some profits at the top, don't worry about it being like oh nobody's gonna 10x, nah, just take the 2x, fantastic move on. And so I was able to do that but then at the same time I tried that strategy in other places and it absolutely like destroyed me as well. So, you know, there's a bit of a balance.
In fact, you wouldn't you wouldn't have thought this one I guess because it's an AI company. It was an AI company before the AI like pump was on, APX Appen. And Appen Altrum buying it at like $10.11 dollars and it went it was going all the way up. It went up to like $40 and I was buying it all the way up and I was like, yes, this is I can see it. It's AI company. Where was I diluted? If you actually look at the underlying business model of it, I'm not gonna get this exactly right. But the underlying model of this is that what happened was, was this, business which would actually have like, oh, you've taken an image and you wanna assess what that image is. They would have a million people that they basically hide to go and basically do a review of the image and improve the models for the big players out there. And I kind of went early like, oh, AI has got some aspects of AI. They're helping.
Oh, well, no, because actually it's just a prop AI. It's just brute human. It's just human brute force. So when prop AI came in, I believe the app and share is like 40¢ or a dollar to this day. So I remember holding it and buying it as it kept on going down. Oh, no. Financially diluted being like, it was a 40 and it's like 30. I'm like, I'm buying some more 20. I'm buying some more $15 I'm buying some more. Yeah. And I wasn't until it's like $5 and I was like, okay, it's time to exit out of this gigantic loss. And I was like, let's lock in some losses. So at the same time, you can still get caught up in the financial delusions of your own mind. This is true.
[00:48:32] Kyrin Down:
You know, I'm the current financial delusion I perhaps now is like the banana zone, I think I can make some profits from from that. And it's once again, I'm not going to be looking at like the the metrics of this amount of wallets doing this activity, maybe some on chain metrics, like in a very, very minor thing. But it's more of the, the, the hype, the psychological aspects of the market rather than underlying deep fundamentals or something like that. So perhaps I'm deluded that I think I can, you know, part of the reason I made these videos on the, the, the crypto one, for example, of what I think like behavior of top and bubble bubble peak forming and stuff like that. Part of it's like, I want to see if I can do it. I want to see if I can pick when the top is and. Yeah, well, like, we'll see. We'll see if I'm successful or not.
There's a very good chance I'm going to learn the lesson that a lot of people have learned, which is, you know, just buy a BTC all of them. All of it. I'll be there. There's a saying there's a saying There's a there's a slight gambling streak in me. There is no doubt. There's a saying in financial markets, right? That it's, you know, when the tide goes out, you'll find out who's wearing pants and who's not wearing pants. Who's swimming naked. Who's swimming naked. And one of the biggest call out for if you want to catch yourself around financial dilutions
[00:49:56] Juan Granados:
is if everything was to, you know, implode, go tits up or something goes erroneously wrong or go over the worst possible predictor of everything, will this business idea, stock, share, crypto, whatever, will it still succeed? Is the underlying value or ideals still hold true? And for some of the things that we've talked about before, Bitcoin. You talk about Bitcoin, but even the most enforced thinkers out there that mean crypto is a shit all around. There is still something to say about Bitcoin and its underlying
[00:50:27] Kyrin Down:
idea. I wanted to bring this up because I think you're gonna have financial delusion of not understanding as well. And particularly you see this with BDC. So I've got it and particularly when it's their job to understand economics or markets in general. So the layperson, sure, I understand why you wouldn't want to dive into the technical aspects, how the revolutionary aspects of it, the freedom technology, all that sort of shit. You know, if you're making money selling, you know, I don't know, goods on eBay, ecommerce or something. And that's your speciality, if you're good at reading financial reports and actually managing to understand that and do well from that, you know, like you don't need to understand this stuff.
But if it's your job to understand financial markets broad at large, I'm talking Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Jamie Dimon, Nassim Taleb, Bill Gates, Paul Krugman, Ruben Nerini, Peter Schiff. These are all, Adam like diamond encrusted haters of BTC or and cryptocurrencies in general, but especially of BTC. It's rat poison, it's rat poison squared. You know, this sort of shit. I think they're financially diluted. Like, I think they're diluted to still once upon a time. Sure. There's maybe you can just brush something off as you know. Yeah, sure. It's this thing. It's coming out of nowhere. It's a beanie bubble, beanie babies, whatever.
When it's when it's like you're four cycles deep and you're still saying the shit and it's at, you know, still like hidden all time highs.
[00:52:05] Juan Granados:
I they're financially diluted, right? Like, can you say they're not financially diluted? Well, but I think this is I think this is my like, thing now with so I was talking about specifically Bitcoin, I went to about the rest, specifically Bitcoin. I think that the, there's all sorts now of financial delusion both on the side of individuals who understand markets who are like, well, fuck this shit, this is like rat poison, not touch it. But there's also the financial deluded I think that, I still view it as people who are thinking it's going to hit a million dollars or it's going to hit half a million dollars. I think, there's financial, realities that it could, it could absolutely.
But that conversation, both the Chiefs and the Bill Gates have the same issue that the ones who are wanting it to go at a half a million or a million or those conversations have, which is they're all to some extent financial dilutions. Maybe some will come true, right? There's still probabilities on both sides of the equation. But at the middle of it, the principle again, if Bitcoin went to zero, if Bitcoin went to a dollar today, right? There is still aspects of Bitcoin that still hold it as being valuable. In that yes you can be separate to the banking system you can interact directly one on one to another peer out there it still holds that value even if the price of it has deteriorated to a point that maybe people who have wanted to get to a million never did. So, it's still value within that, like it's still usable. Again, the comparison to stocksis.com, Bubble in the verse. Similar time, pets.com and Amazon basically all, created in terms of the, share price. Pezocom eventually just got, I think it got re bought out by somebody else. But Amazon lost $92.95 percent.
But underlying Amazon losing all of its value, well, sorry, losing all of its price per market capital, underlying that was still a really good business model that people are going to use and so eventually it came back. I can't see that with Bitcoin where it's like, Yeah, even if it dropped another 80%, ninety %, forty %, whatever, underlying that, there's some good value that hasn't come about at all, right? And there was lots of unique ways of the way that it was created, the way that it was set up as a protocol, the way people operate with it now. It's like that value won't change, that's still there. But the price itself, I think is where people can get into the financial delusion around it.
I don't think I'm all the way across in that, Hey, I want to own Bitcoin for its value. There's still aspects of me that'd be like, Oh, yeah, very much a price. But it's maybe it's inching a little bit more towards that that end. But I go the Bill Gates and the conversations that's financially diluted because like okay, yeah we're not talking you're not talking about the value of what that product benefits, you know, from a value, you're talking price. And there's the other aspect where you see people talking about, yeah, it's gonna reach half a million, a million, 2 million. Then I also go, there's some financial delusions there.
I won't say it's a gamble, an investment. It's a prediction for it to happen. And there are some basis as to it doing that. At least there's some linkages because of the value underlying that. But I still kind of go, Yeah, but I, I, there was something in a podcast I listened to recently, it was like, eventually, hope for something like Bitcoin would be for it to become not volatile anymore and to be stable in its price. And the more stable that price is, I think the more the value of Bitcoin itself will become apparent. Because right now it is just price city up down everyone has a conversation. I have not seen for a long especially maybe on audio like podcasts and videos maybe I do see it but especially on like people putting it into like blogs or anything. I haven't seen for a long time people talking about the underlying value of Bitcoin. It's just price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price, price like, okay, so I guess a financial delusion in my mind is, I don't know if there's exactly a delusion, but if tomorrow Bitcoin goes doubles, dollars $300 bang, it's trillion $300,000 I think overwhelmingly, it will be conversation of price.
Underwhelmingly, there won't be a lot of conversation about the value of Bitcoin. Yeah, I don't
[00:56:20] Kyrin Down:
I don't I think there's kind of separate topic to be honest around financial diligence. The so for example, the I think the the people who are arguing against Bitcoin, the so some of them, I think it's it's kind of this, there's a financial incentive for them to argue against them. Looking at you, Peter Schiff, like he gets so much engagement, he gets so much name recognition, people bring him on podcasts, because they like to dunk on him. And I think he's kind of a semi willing participant in this where he's like, if I talk about Bitcoin in a negative way, I get engagement, I get positive things happen from this side. I think there's something to that for a couple of them shift maybe Nassim Taleb.
The other ones though, they're arguing against the in some way, miss they're misguided of the fundamental aspects of it, though they don't know about it, they haven't put in enough work to look into these things. So they perhaps don't know what humans actually want or reality actually is for a lot of people. And where they or they just is it diluted if you're ignorant? Probably not. I probably wouldn't call that diluted. So maybe a lot of these people. Yeah, maybe a lot of them saying they're financially diluted is incorrect. They're just really, really ignorant of, of what Bitcoin is. So,
[00:57:53] Juan Granados:
you know, and Like, let's just broaden it just not descriptive. I would just say, I think you would be financially, I think you've got to be financially diluted if the some of the basic principles you just not willfully like specifically you're being obtuse or trying to do away with some of the basic principle like like demanding capacity like demand if you're just not even caring about that or anything Financial, you're missing a gigantic piece of the puzzle and if you're just trying to be like, that doesn't matter because of whatever. No, shut the fuck up. Like no, that's a humongous aspect to anything will any asset you want to think about. If there isn't demand, then dilly squat, you know, Bitcoin in its initial days to where it is now, a lot of it has come from its demand. It's not like it's dramatically changed its functionality and its delivery nor is an asset like a house that different to what it was thirty years ago. What will change is underlying market, how much demand do you need for it, right? If you have a, if all of a sudden in, let's say New South Wales, the outflow of people leaving New South Wales is more than the incoming people. And so there's less people that actually need a house, or roof over their head, guess what?
Then there's not as much demand for the product itself, the prices go down. Like, that's very, very, you know, simple along that. There's other things that may happen, but I would say there's probably some other basic principles in financial spaces that if you are willfully ignorant about, you're delusional. Like that is a delusional aspect. So in the game sub examples and BBBY, there's probably some of those things that people were delusional about. But maybe, but again, like I said, you can also profit off financial delusion as long as you are aware of that delusion that's occurring. Yeah. Yeah. And
[00:59:38] Kyrin Down:
yeah, can you not profit from being financially diluted in the wrong sense? So you know, the Bill Gates and the like that they're stubborn, they don't want to admit they're wrong, you know, they seem to live so fucking arrogant that they'd, you know, already made up their mind. Perhaps there's some straight up differences of how they view reality is different. But yeah.
[01:00:01] Juan Granados:
To them individually, right, you'll you'll be listening are very, very wealthy. Like, okay, maybe if they did decide to go down the pro Bitcoin, they do become a little bit more wealthy. That's kinda like, so what? Like, does that really change? Like life that dramatically? Well, not even there are, you know, for the people they influence is perhaps, you know, but do they give a shit about that? I don't know. Like, do you give a shit that someone who's listening to right now, because sometimes we talk about Bitcoin, they will go and buy some Bitcoin. I don't think about it that often.
[01:00:32] Kyrin Down:
I don't view myself as a financial advisor. I think if you're writing financial advice, you know, Warren Buffett's famous annual investment to letters, annual letter to investors. Yeah. And that in that case, yeah, there's there's more responsibility than than I certainly feel for true. But but then again, for him, he's seen, you know, he's seen
[01:00:54] Juan Granados:
multiple decades versus things where you can still make money in what he is suggesting.
[01:00:59] Kyrin Down:
I think I think that what he's suggesting I think is you can't make money in bitcoin and you're gonna lose it all and that I disagree with. Yeah,
[01:01:07] Juan Granados:
I would probably say this would help the world if you, if you disagree with maybe not something that's like an obvious scam or something else, feel free to call that out. I think that I wouldn't be too saddened by that. But When it's something called the dust. Manchu. When it's like something that's either on the fence or there it's just it's a genuine conversation around such complex things, you're probably better off just stepping away from that particular conversation if you think that you have a negative thought about it. You could get into some conversations around NFTs where you can say look, maybe some of the top NFTs are still hanging around. You could say like well this one's a bit better than that one, but this one's worse than the other. I wouldn't mind the conversation of like, oh, yeah. This is better because of these reasons.
I don't think it's very worth it to have a conversation. Oh, yeah. But this one's bad because of it's like, yeah. I'd rather take step away from that one. I kinda see the similar thing with Bitcoin or other better, not better performing but better value, valued assets where it's like, if you really disagree with that particular one, actually I'd probably just prefer you don't put that point out there as opposed to trying to force people not to go down that path because it still has some sort of inherent value. Yeah. But maybe someone will have a different view of that. All right. Let's jump onto the aftermath of
[01:02:26] Kyrin Down:
what happens from financial delusions and when they're, when they started to being popped or Easy, easy, very easy. Yeah. You ready for it?
[01:02:34] Juan Granados:
All financial markets, lots of people lose money. Lots of people make money. Is it like, again, economy wise, from a, from a, from a broader, from a broad economy, right? If you're thinking about from the entire economy, the fact that the economy grows like the whole pie grows and shrinks and expands, there's a general expansion by way of inflation and the traditional fiat whole process. I guess in Bitcoin it's a limited amount of Bitcoin and that's how many Bitcoin it is, isn't expanding, the pie isn't getting bigger, it's the I guess the way that you're slicing it down and the people who are interacting with it and then that maps to the
[01:03:12] Kyrin Down:
whatever market model economic model is being used, whatever. But after financial bubbles, it's like, you're gonna lose some money, you're gonna make some money. You've skipped to the end and missed all the juicy stuff on. I'm gonna give people what they want. So the, you know, you see declines of 30 plus percent in a manner of weeks or months. Crypto is certainly higher for this. Typically exaggerated reports of suicides. You hear you hear about suicides, but like, I struggle to believe that they're all related to exactly that that that it's kind of like, you know, sorrow is a young Werther effect. You know, the when people start talking about suicides, more suicides happen because people are looking out for it. It's it's now I don't know the there's the I think the actual linkage is hard to prove that true. FDX goes down and all these people who are committing suicide are because of FTX. You know, it's just a nice thing to be able to point out and be like, oh, there's the link. That's the. Yeah, that's what it was before. Whereas I think it's usually a lot more things going on in people's lives that affect that huge fraud eventually gets untangled. So typically spending money from capital that isn't yours borrowed and happens after the bubble pops, but then run on effects of bankruptcies mount to other semi legit and even legit companies. So shout out to the 1920s Charles Ponzi and SBF for doing that.
Old heroes fall from grace. So speculators, owners, savvy businessmen, prestige companies lose big and become bankrupt, flee or go to jail. Here's one Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe fame. Eve lost a whole bunch of money and like his is like prestige as an author certainly went down after that, which is pretty funny. Pain is spread out past the speculators themselves. Governments capitulate and socialize the losses. So here's a pretty wild one. In 1847, Parliament in England, They suspended the bank act that they'd made just three years earlier, where three years earlier, they're like, we're not going to make you whole if you're speculating in XYZ, joint stock company. Yep, that's your loss, you're going to take it just three years later.
[01:05:36] Juan Granados:
They're going to bail out people.
[01:05:38] Kyrin Down:
Yep. It was it was so hilarious that they make this and then then just rescind it so quickly. And that's continued to this day. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes it's because of hidden exposure where third or fourth order effect is enough to wipe out a solid, sustainable business. So, you know, when governments are eyeing up crypto, it's just going to bail out the governments if that goes down. So that'd be pretty funny. Everybody blames everybody. So no one comes out looking good at best neutral. And there's usually like tears of anger, disappointment, shame and woe. The moral reprisals and regulation to stop the activity of degenerate gamblers as they are known. 1968, Nixon bought them that.
So this is coming big time for AI. Like when when the the crypto slash AI bubble pops, I reckon there's going to be there's going to be a lot of, you know, pointing of fingers. And then the final one time heals all wounds and after a month, a year of life daily living like it goes on. I would like it's not the people have adapted. So the only
[01:06:47] Juan Granados:
of that, by the way, I the only one that I'm like, I wonder if I'm just alluded. But I really do go, is it going to be a pop for AI? Or as of the boy, is it going to be one of those like, we're going to just pop downwards and then we're going to settle into some sort of reality? Or is it going to pop super cycle upwards and just go even more extreme into the like not fear my I don't know if something like this will happen will the evolution in some of the tech and uses of AI even surprise us to where we are today where it's like, oh, you thought it was going to take ten years for 80% of the jobs to kind of go away.
Ah, it's six months. That would be some sort of level of, of not, I'm not talking like, financial like changeover where it's like, oh wow some companies are gonna pop really big, which they will, but it's a whole order of changeover to what do you do when basically everyone like let's just say 40% of people just order over a couple of months become jobless where people are genuinely not hiring them anymore because there's no need, like we can just replace you with something that's costing us cents in terms of energy basically. That level of shift at such a speed would prove ridiculous in some particular like financial aspects and in other ways it would not like in some ways bad impact in some ways great impact for particular companies. What would governments do to try sustain those sort of individuals? I don't know, there's some aspects I'm like, I think I'm deluding myself in something like that happening. It definitely dilutive man. There's gonna be bubbles and gonna be pops that that's not gonna change. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like my again, you know, more or less if you if someone out there is like kind of closer to some of these out there to give me an impression, tell me. But I've now seen personally personally seen two companies that are now laying off people in favor of AI usage and I've started to read of a lot more companies out there who are reducing the numbers. The big players, Meta, Alphabet, a few others, where they are forcefully reducing their numbers to increase the AI usage, especially in the developer front. Like, they're starting to get rid of developers in order to have one developer essentially man 20 AIs.
And if it just the rate of speed continues to go high, I kind of go like damn, one of the one, a personal observation that I've seen or whatever reason I get these all the time on Linkedin so maybe maybe it's I don't know why I literally don't know why. I get notifications all the time. It's specifically US people looking for jobs on LinkedIn, that maybe they get all the likes or the comments on that particular, follow me social media, LinkedIn. All of them are like, I've been trying to get a job for six months, eight months, ten months, nothing, no one wants to hire me. I keep a tip sent off 100 CVs at different companies, and all wants to hire me what's going on. And I was all these comments and people saying, you know, when you interview do this, you know, actually when you go do that, but generally a lot of those roles are developers, HR people, lawyers and I keep seeing this again and again and again on LinkedIn being like, I can't get a job, I can't find it. I'd love to see some stats on how many people are shifting to like looking for work, new work, something to that effect. Because my gut tells me, I reckon it's going to move way quicker than we expect. Where most, like a lot of companies are going to see this all of a sudden like, why in the hell would I be hiring someone and paying them $10 a month when I can pay $2.32 for the same role?
[01:10:23] Kyrin Down:
That's coming. I'm telling you that is coming. My gut tells me that those people I'd love to meet those people and be like, how can you not find any job in six to eight, nine, ten months of trying? In their profession, I want like because I think broadly you could find that job anywhere, I think.
[01:10:40] Juan Granados:
If I, when I start hearing that in person, like if I had a mate or something who said like, Hey, I'm Mate Mitchell. If he goes like, Hey, I'm in Accounting. I can no longer find a job in Accounting because no one's hiring anymore for that. It's just purely being outsourced to AI. That's when I go like, I mean, that's validated what I'm thinking. Like that's coming. It's not gonna have effects in the real world for a long time. That's my opinion. My call out here, this is my mere mortal light prediction for your home, end of twenty twenty six. I reckon this will be a news
[01:11:13] Kyrin Down:
out of the news big topic being like we have a problem you people are not getting like oh yeah but you just said there's going to be a super cycle so everything's going to be good right Like, well, financial assets, everything's going up. Good
[01:11:26] Juan Granados:
for the people who we will be good for? No, disagree. Not for the people who are not in the positions to profit from. Absolutely disagree. There's no way that
[01:11:36] Kyrin Down:
the if if news cycles are talking negative, we've got big problems and things like this and you think asset prices are still going to be going up and no way. Absolutely no way. More or less who we reckon is financially diluted. We'll find that in 2026.
[01:11:50] Juan Granados:
I got to finish
[01:11:51] Kyrin Down:
with how do you know if there's financial delusion in the air? It's you can see it in the people. And so Robert Downey's Wall Street card comes to mind and go check this up. Type in Robert Downey Wall Street. And so he was doing like this documentary and he visited Wall Street and he's like, if money is evil, then that building is hell. This is the most obnoxious group of money hungry, low IQ, high energy jackrabbit, fucking wannabe big time, small time shit talking, bothersome, irritating bunch of motherfuckers I have ever had to endure for more than five minutes. And it is I love that clip, man. It's a great clip. You see him in there getting like jostled around. There's this dude with two phones in his ears, like bumping into the like he literally bumps into the back of Robert Downey Jr. Yeah. No idea. Just fucking shouting into these two phones into his ears. It is fucking hilarious.
So good. So if you're in that sort of environment, you know, there's some financial delusion going on.
[01:12:50] Juan Granados:
There you go. Any more lines? You tell us at home what other financial delusions are coming our ways. We're gonna partake in our conversation around where you think we are right or wrong. Feel free to do it at the Discord channel. Plenty of conversation you can do. Yeah. Come join there. We're much more active there than we have been in the past. Correct. Comments, obviously, since we're any comments, I don't know if there's any on the live at the moment. Just looking this up. I think there was just some eye emojis from
[01:13:15] Kyrin Down:
C4 system three one graph three. Good. Oh, shit. They're setting up eye emojis. Should we look into this? What does it mean? Should we look into this? I know.
[01:13:25] Juan Granados:
They're watching us. Beyond that, again, send through some boostograms, go and utilize the platforms out there that allow you to support the value for value model.
[01:13:34] Kyrin Down:
There's, Fountain, TrueFrame, Samsung, There's plenty out there. Yeah. If you have a Alby hub connecting to those ones is what you need. Yep.
[01:13:43] Juan Granados:
Leave it there for now. New Morning Lights. Hope you're well wherever you are in the world. As always, Sundays, 9AM, chilling Eastern Time when we go live. Yep. Join me for the next one. For now, bye now. Carry on. Good.