Soger and Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment.

Okay, everyone, it's Friday. What am I doing in your ears? The reason? Well, you've seen all of this craziness going on

GameStop and Wall Street bets and Reddit and Robinhood and look, we wanted to bring you an emergency podcast where we could break all of this down and help you think about

what is really just a crazy moment in modern American politics and business and more. It just encapsulates everything that we think and that we talk about here. The changing nature of business and tech, the intersection of politics, now regulators are getting involved and it's just been something that I've seen, you know, so many of you expressed so much interest in on my show rising or in my Instagram and more that I wanted to help all of you guys think about this. So we brought on a friend of our show CNBC analyst and author of the show.

The big technology podcast and newsletter Alex Cantrowitz. He's had some great takes whenever it comes to this and he really helps sum up how we can think about this moment. The little guys on Reddit versus the Goliaths on Wall Street is that actually even the case why Robinhood has the most ad hoc moderation policies like known to man corruption, the business elite, all of them.

And a quick thing, this is basically the big technology podcast week. We went on Alex's show on Wednesday. There is a link to that at the bottom in our show notes, check it out. He's a real friend of the show we were like speaking with him and you all know the deal in the bottom of the show notes. You have the link to our sub stack to our book shop and to our YouTube channel. Check it all out.

As always, a special thank you to the Lincoln Network for sponsoring this podcast. Let's go.

Alex Cantrowitz, welcome back to the realignment. It's great to be back last time we talked about how the market was irrational. That was the clip that you guys picked to highlight. And well, it's been an interesting couple of months since so.

Obviously, the market has returned to rationality and everything is okay. So let's go. Well, that's exactly right. Yeah.

So this is just great to talk with you because it's basically big technology, your sub stack and your podcast week with us. We did an episode of your podcast on Wednesday. Now you're coming back on Friday. So it's great to have you.

The thing that everyone is obviously thinking right now is game stop, social media, Reddit, Discord, CMBC, every single possible topic we cover on the show is brought together. And I want to bring everyone in with some really excellent tweets that you had. This should frame the discussion for we're looking at today. So the first one is the biggest stories in politics, tech and finance today are all social media. That's really excellent.

Then we have Robinhood is now hated by retail investors Wall Street hedge funds Ted Cruz and a OC. Good luck with this one folks and the thing that ties all this together is Joe promise Joe Biden promised unity. And here we are.

Where are Alex brought together?

We're together again. All it took was a Wall Street Reddit subreddit driving game stop to ridiculous heights in order to have folks come together.

I just want to say, do you know how nice it is to have to talk about something and not use the word Trump period?

It's so beautiful how irrelevant even Biden is to this conversation and has nothing to do with politics. So thank you, Joe. Your return to normalcy is here. Let's update everybody.

Okay, so this is an emergency podcast. We want to make sure we can get you guys and help you think about what is going on. So as we stand right now, we're taking this one, 07 PM.

It is on Thursday. So the current state of affairs is that, okay, let's start at the very beginning. There's a subreddit called Wall Street bets. That subreddit identified a bunch of short stock positions held by some major head funds on Wall Street.

And they decided to drive the price up of that stock dramatically to enrich themselves number one and in order to screw over this hedge fund.

That successfully happened over the last two days. It was a really the first time that we saw these hedge funds that were a target of a social media mob and the power of platforms like Robinhood, which is a free trading applications and other brokers like E-trade.

Okay, so that was the 48 hour kind of the David versus Goliath story David actually won. So now Goliath is struck back.

So where we are right now is that Robinhood as of this morning has decided to ban the ability of its cost. Well, I don't want to say customers. We're going to get into that soon of its users from being able to purchase GameStop stock, Nokia stock, Blackberry stock. I believe him missing one, but you guys get the idea.

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