From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily.

What started as a story about Reddit versus Wall Street, the little guy versus the man,

has revealed itself to be something larger, a kind of story of our time.

Today, my colleagues, technology reporter Taylor Lorenz and business columnist Andrew

Ross Sorkin, sort through the meaning of GameStop.

It's Monday, February 1.

So Taylor, I want to start where this story starts, which is far from Wall Street.

You write about internet culture for the times. Tell us what you were observing in the weeks

leading up to this becoming a huge national story. I spend a lot of time on Reddit,

which is basically full of all of these little sub-forms called subreddits. And there's one,

in particular, called Wall Street Bets, that has a pretty notorious culture on Reddit.

It's full of these, essentially, day traders, people that trade small amounts of stocks,

big amounts of stocks, they're kind of individual traders that don't work for hedge funds or anything.

It's mostly young men, a lot of people in their teens or 20s. It's very irreverent, and it has

its own language. They post kind of non-stop memes and jokes. They call winnings or gains tenders.

It's a playoff tender, sort of tender money. They called it chicken tenders and now tenders.

So it's very customary when you have big gains on a stock to celebrate with a plate of fried chicken

tenders. So it's kind of self-consciously poking fun at the normal world of stock trading?

Yeah. It's like if the normal world of stock trading took a bunch of shrooms and started live streaming itself.

So Wall Street Bets is kind of this place where the incentives of stock trading and incentives

of the internet overlap and meet. It's not just about trading a stock and making money.

It's also about maybe having a viral moment or launching an online campaign or

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