What's going on? The interview you're about to listen to is with Mr Ben Mesri who happens to be a famed author he wrote Bringing Down the House which got turned into the movie 21 he authored The Accidental Billionaires which became the Social Network and most recently he wrote the Antisocial Network which is now the movie Dumb Money for obvious reasons I Was beyond excited to interview the man who was behind the movie Dumb Money and our conversation did not disappoint. Not only did Ben share special insights into the movie Dumb Money and really the entire retail Revolution but at the end of our talk he discussed his newest book breaking Twitter the story of Elon Musk which is going to be very exciting I Hope you enjoy I Very much appreciate you joining me and the audience today. Ben How are you doing I'm doing great! Thanks so much for having me! I Think we're going to get into an awesome conversation now. for those of you listening who maybe don't know Ben by name.

you definitely know him by his work. So he happened to have authored I believe Bringing Down the House which got turned into the movie 21 you also wrote what was it, the Accidental Billionaires I want to get that name right? That C turned into the Social Network and then obviously most recently the Antisocial Network which is now in the movie Dumb Money. But beyond that I Believe you've authored roughly 25 plus books honestly I Don't know where you find the time, but obviously a lot of your work is turned into pretty popular movies. Yeah, it's been a a really great run I guess um uh I've been writing for a long time now and it's uh, it's just been a great sort of lucky you know situation where I keep running into the right people to work with and uh, and I've had three movies now so it's been a lot of fun.

Yeah, honestly your story is very impressive and I'm sure we could speak for hours about just the crazy things you've personally experienced. but I do want to really kick things off with the most recent movie that got created out of your book and that's obviously the movie Dumb Money. Right now it's just the viral Trend I See a lot of people talking about it. A lot of people are almost having the Nostalgia of what was happening in 2021.

but I want to bring up a recent quote that I saw from you that this isn't a movie, it's a movement. So can you tell us like what was I guess your reasoning behind that and what was what have you been seeing from 2021 till now? That makes you think that what you encapsulated in this book is much more of a movement than anything else. Yeah, I mean I think that what happened in 2021 with GameStop and more generally with we retail Traders was that. um, it was all of this anger bubbling up.

It wasn't about really stock play or or making some money on the internet. although you know there were speculative people and there were people who were certainly trying to make money. But really, what was going on here in my mind was a movement uh, against Wall Street against sort of the the corruption that people see, the unfair playing field, the fact that we were in the midst of a pandemic, the most miserable moment kind of in recent history and people were really struggling, you know. And and meanwhile Wall Street was doing great and and they were, you know, hedge funds, you know, shorting the heck out of companies that were falling apart because of the pandemic and hoovering up all the stimulus checks via these short plays.

And I think people got angry and I think why people bought GameStop was the was sort of the center of why we made dumb money. It wasn't you know about necessarily all of the sort of intricacies of of of you know, buying and selling stocks. It was more about this emotional moment where people decided they were going to take on Wall Street and they were going to push Gme to the Moon Um, so yeah to me it's it's a movement that got started. This is the origin of that movement.

Um, and it's going to carry forwards. um as we move. you know, on um in various Fields not just on Wall Street Not just in the economy, but we see it in politics. We see it in culture.

We see that people are really angry and they want um they want to to know know why things seem so rigged against them I think that's a beautiful way to put it and obviously the machine itself doesn't like when you stand up. Against The Machine now I haven't seen the movie Dum Money yet but I do have tickets for this weekend. but yesterday my book showed up and it was one of those books folks. I'm telling you if you listen to this right now and you haven't read the book Dum money or really the antisocial Network it showed up and I I I read it straight through.

It was awesome and for me personally the one character that I like really really resonated with I believe his name was Jeremy more of like a college age like I just I saw a lot of myself cuz for me I was following the subreddit before anything was crazy I had Gme myself and I was sitting in my basement in Philadelphia and when it started to work like that was the craziest thing like to me there was this giant community of people in on the troll in on the joke and there was so many like little things that just made perfect sense of just like the cats and the memes and just like the banter of the community was fun and I think it was a thing that a lot of people relied on to get through. Like you said, really tough times I mean the world was essentially like just locked up and not like very much was locked up. So just like the emotional highs and lows of a younger gentleman who like was roughly my age, it was funny cuz it I had almost a lot of my own like personal emotional flashbacks as I was going through the book cuz I was like oh I noticed that I felt that way like it it was so crazy so I'm sure for you I Guess the question is here is did you know much about the stock market before this? like are you an active Trader yourself or was this like your first step into the I guess world of trading? No. So I I played penny stocks so many years ago back there were pink sheets and there was no internet.

you know I' I've been involved in the stock market for a very long time. um writing about it I wrote a book called Ugly Americans Once Upon a Time which was about um uh Japanese uh exchanges and these Americans who go over to Tokyo and become expat traders in the market um you you know I've I've written a book called rigged about the oil market so I've sort of died in in the economy a bit in my stories um I was not an expert on GameStop you know when that stock started going crazy I was watching it like everybody else going ah, should I buy GameStop this is nuts and I agree the whole meme aspect of it. Um, you know and when you watch the movie you'll see they you know we go real deep into all the memes. You know you're going to see everything that you remember from those times.

It was really a big part of how young people communicate and how irreverent and how sort of dirty you know Reddit could be. Um, but that definitely helped move this forwards. It was almost like a a force field that kept Wall Street away from understanding what was going on because when Wall Street analysts opened up Wall Street bets they saw 10 million crazy comments and memes and thought it was a joke and didn't understand that. this was a mechanism of communication that was really potent and people were going nuts you know? and and uh, and so yeah, that was a big part of the story for sure.

Yeah, I mean the the sense of I I get that there's a lot of Market structure things to understand and a lot of Market mechanics to understand, but a whole. Another aspect that I don't really hear many people talk of, but it's a thing that you actually dove into was more of the psychology of the group. Maybe that's sociology or whatever it's called, but this almost perfect storm of people are locked inside. It's a scary time on, like really on the outset, but they found these digital communities.

and then all of a sudden you almost have these biblical stories of David versus Goliath where obviously the retail Trader a guy who was what in a red band wearing just like his cat shirt saying hey I like the stock I think it's undervalued and then all of a sudden people just rally behind it. and like obviously humans in a general sense, they love that troll like like GameStop was perfect. It really was the sentimental value. We know what's going on.

and of course, in a world where everything's going digital and things are shutting down I I Kind of understand the thesis of the people betting against it, but but obviously they were really not able to understand the thesis of people who are going to buy it and then to hear these ridiculous things of oh, I'll hold it till zero like like pry my shares out of my cold dead hand I Don't think they ever thought it was real and obviously the price action of the stock itself told the world that they didn't expect what was going to happen. So I guess on that note, like you said, you've covered so many things. Was there an aspect with in this story of whether it's payment for order flow, the fact that a short interest could get above 100% or any of the other craziness. Ken Griff And Gaylock and all that stuff.

was there something that just floored you when you realized it was real When you're just like, oh, this is like actually happening right now I Mean there was a lot to the story? I mean obviously Robin Hood Taking the buy button away was, you know, the the center of a lot of this. It was so to me, unexpected and spectacularly wrong. right? That was it galvanized. I mean you, you had that moment where like, are they really doing that? It looked like whatever was really happening there.

It looked really, really suspect to everybody watching it. um and obvious, killed the rally and and uh, and you know, even though there was a rally afterwards when the buy button came back on, you know it. Definitely, you know, changed the whole story dramatically and led to the Congressional hearings and everything like Sou. So for me, I'm obviously that's the most surprising moment in the whole thing.

Um, and who knows what would have happened if that hadn't happened. I mean seriously, you know, uh, it would have been a crazy, crazy situation. um and um, and so yeah. I think that's the most surprising aspect.

The other thing that was surprising to me as I was researching it was how absolutely diverse the people who bought into GameStop were it was not. You know what you might expect of just you know, white guys trading stocks? you know it was. not that at all. It was an incredibly diverse group of people um, which we tried to represent in the book and the movie.

It was everybody from every Walk of Life jumping in on this um and for mostly the same reasons you know, which was really, really neat. Yeah I think that's a great way to explain it because I I guess in a strange way, it almost shows that many different people from many different walks of life are more than happy to kind of like show their middle finger to Wall Street at any given point cuz like I think a lot of it, it goes even much deeper I mean when people were reaching out to me like I was streaming the whole thing and really the whole event is what caused me to go from Corporate America to being a content creator and obviously this is something I just really, really enjoy. But a lot of people they're bringing up 2008. they're bringing up the tech bubble.

They're bringing up things that happened in the 9s I think this was a boiling point but didn't just start recently I think it was decades and decades in stories from grandparents and people's parents and all of a sudden they like a unique circumstance came about and enough people rallied behind it that I think it was really expressing anger for just generically how things go with quote: unquote people and power whether it's politicians or even Wall Street or obviously in this scenario I would argue the intersection of the two. But but it truly is in my book, a crazy psychological development. You referred to what happened with Robin Hood and the Buy Button. Uh, this isn't giving anything away, but I think you did a great job of explaining this in the book of apparently Robin Hood The co-founders and the CEO uh, they had ambition to be in the world of finance and Fin Tech and at first they were really in the world of I believe highfrequency trading or something fast data sets for the rich and I guess they had a moral moment where they're like hang on we don't want help the rich get richer so that's how they came up with Robin Hood But and I guess a Twist of irony.

As you said, no one knows how high Gme AKA GameStop would have gone. So if and I I don't know I I still have my reservations of is Vlad truly on the side of I Guess retail or not? Uh, but in a Twist of irony You could argue his actions of taking away the Buy button was actually one of the biggest detractors of retail wealth that we've ever seen since the creation of Robin Hood So on that note, from your research and the stories and the documents and the vast just I guess effort you put into this Vlad Do you think it was a massively unfortunate event I Know he was citing like a one in 3.5 million chance like Yada y y something like that or do you think that just like anyone in Wall Street he was doing what either made him money or protected him from losing money or you somewhere in the middle of the gray area I mean listen, there's a lot of sort of questions. you can go in a lot of different directions with what happened Vlad I I mean their their initial selling point was they were democratizing Finance um which we kind of make fun of in the book in the movie A lot because it was really a great Silicon Valley type story as if occupi Wall Street was all about trying to find a way to buy more stock. you know, which wasn't at all what the occupied Wall Street movement was about.

Um, so yeah. I mean there's suspicions from the beginning that what they were really trying to do was make a lot of money. um, payment Flor overflow is a is a very ugly practice that certainly seems to have a lot of Shadow around it. and and and that's something else we talk about a lot in the movie.

um and then the you know what happened that day when he got rid of the buy button. Looking at it from his point of view, you know he got a massive call from uh from you know the the agency that that that you know he has to put up a certain amount of money to back all the traits going through his thing and they just simply didn't have that money. So the negotiation he made was I'll get rid of the buy button and you'll drop how much we have to put up. Uh but what really part of the story that we don't get so deep into the movie is that the reason they had so many issues with uh with their you know that part of their business was they decided to do it themselves.

They built their own kind of uh uh what do you call it clearing company that they used um and that ended up not being able to handle the situation. so you know. listen I'm not. You know an expert on this and I think you should.

You know check the movie out and read the book and decide for yourself where you think the flaw was or what Vlad is like in in person. um but I think that you know obviously what happened was it killed the rally and it hurt the very people that Robin Hood was built around which is supposed to be the retail. Trader Um so yeah it was H it was pretty wild. What I found to be so interesting was like the market.

the story itself like there's a superficial level and a lot of people focus on that. but then obviously in the Underbelly there's a lot of complexity. so obviously we could talk about buying and selling stock. But then the the Underbelly the like: what's going on with clearing what's going on with payment for order flow settlement times but then also this story even that it's very easy to look at Robin Hood and Vlad it's very easy to look at Gabe plin and betting against Jmy but once again there there's an underneath to it that I would argue is even more interesting now.

I'm in no way saying any of those guys are innocent or guilty. hey I I don't know Everyone like you said can come up with their own opinion. but one point that I think it was a smaller point in the book but I I man I just think it carried so much weight of when they had the opportunity to really ask questions to Ken Griffin the founder and CEO of Citadel the hedge fund and all Citadel the market maker. our Congress was asking him questions and I don't know why I expected ever anything more from Congress but they didn't ask the right questions, they didn't get to any depth they almost it was like plating Their audience their potential voters maybe their constituents of like hey look I fought for the right thing I said something bad about billionaires but once again, whether you agree with that or not, that wasn't the point of it.

They for once were able to pin down one of the most influential people in Wall Street and they let them just like basically swim away. They didn't ask anything of actual value to get to the heart of some of these issues. and even with this like another point that you brought up in the book with Gabe Plin, a lot of people were like trying to point out of like oh, did he have insulin there that and then I forgot this living in myself that he closed out his short position before the buy button was even taken away. So there's things like that where there's a super official story which is good to know and to be informed.

but underneath just I think so many things get missed, whether it's just even my own remembrance of what happened with Gabe Plen to the highest level of politicians. Finally, we could have asked Ken Griffin something about Market making and they still just absolutely did it. Yeah well, I think there's this huge disconnect between the level that Ken Griffin is playing at and the level of knowledge of Congress I think that it's very hard for them to even know what to ask a guy like that and he was looking at them like these people have no idea what it is I do for a living I mean it's it's uh, the level of economic education that you would need to even challenge someone like Ken Griffin is is tricky for a career politician. Um, it's got to be someone who's been in finance for a long time and really understands how this all works.

Um, so it's a scary thing that you know something like I don't know what the actual numberers but like 40% of Trades retail trades all go through Ken Griffin He's at the center of the American economy. He's at the center of Wall Street as a market maker and yet he runs this giant hedge fund. Um, and there's a lot of stuff that sort of needs to be overseen. Um, but he's way too powerful for anybody on Congress to oversee.

um. so It's Tricky place and I think that you saw the Congressional hearing where people were just kind of hapless. they didn't know what to ask. It was a it was a crazy kind of scene which is why we kind of ended the book in the movie on it.

it's just such a really almost. you know the comedy writes itself in that situation. People are trying to challenge you know, Ken and and Vlad and and then roring Kitty sitting there you know, with a cat poster behind him and a bandana um, answering questions to to to Congress So um yeah, it's wild I don't think that anybody knows what to ask hen in the situation and and and I'm not sure how one regulates someone that powerful man Fair like I didn't think of it that way, but you're definitely spoton. I I guess even though they didn't have the right questions to ask or the right way to think about it I've been reading as you're doing the tour kind of getting people excited and Shining a light on the movie Dumb money.

It seems like a lot of the Quote Unquote Establishment still doesn't understand the story, still doesn't understand the point. For example, I recently listened to one of your Clips with CNBC where you were discussing a myriad of things and one of the things I got from the anchors that were asking you the questions was they're still dumbfounded that anyone ever bought Gme. They're beyond disbelief that people still own Gme and it really doesn't make sense to them because it seems like it's almost that cookie cutter education of hey, I have an MBA We look at fundamental value and if something is fundamentally overvalued, you buy it and then if it's fundamentally overvalued, you either don't touch it or you bet against it something like that. But uh, it really struck stuck out to me as like Cookie Cutter education of Just Finance and investing not understanding the human element now I I Guess on that.

First of all, do you agree with it and do you think the Quote Unquote Establishment will ever learn? I Guess the point of retail? The power of retail or anything in that lane? Yeah, so I mean I think there's a huge disconnect in that I Think that Wall Street On the whole, thinks that people are still, you know 20 years ago and looking at the fundamentals of companies and making decisions based on rational uh, aspects of profit and and loss and things like that. When really, there's a huge emotional component to investing. and because of social media and the ability of millions and millions of people to communicate instantly. And because of things like Robin Hood that allow you to buy and sell with no bank accounts and just a tiny bit of money.

uh, the emotion trumps rationality for the most part. and that value no longer is Tethered To fundamentals, it's much more Tethered to the community around it. And so we've seen this in crypto and we've seen this in stock markets now. and we're going to see it again and again and again.

And it's short term. To some extent, emotions drive it up like a crazy place and then it goes back down and then it goes back up. But the volatility is going to be part of the story from now on, especially with anything that regular people know about. Um, so hedge funds have to operate much more secretly.

Now they have to pay attention to social media. They have to know what the sentiment is. You can't short a beloved company no matter how bad its fundamentals are. Um, and that's just going to be the truth going forwards.

and I think Also, CEOs are starting to you're watching what AMC is doing right now and the CEO is talking to the retail Traders daily on Twitter right now? Um, because he understands that this emotional component can drive the stock now can look at that and say, well, he's being you know Uh Machiavelli and he's doing this to pump the stock at certain points where he needs to so that he can. You know you can decide why he's doing this, but this is what. um, smart CEOs and Smart Companies are going to start to understand that the backbone of their value is no longer just profits or or that kind of thing. The backbone of their value is the millions of people who decide to buy their stock.

Um, and that's something Wall Street just doesn't get and eventually will. but it's going to have to happen again and again and again for them to understand. I I Definitely want to return to your concept of what CEOs are doing and I definitely agree with you being uh, smart. but even before that I Love how mainstream media acts as if this is a new thing when in really it's just a new medium of communication my mind I mean back in the 1600s, it's still a joke in my Twitter bio these days.

or I should say my exbio of the Tulip Mania I mean back in the 1600s, in the Netherlands people were training a singular tulip bulb for an entire house. So this is more really. it's deeply rooted in being a human cuz it's not like they were talking about it on Reddit when we're hundreds of years ago, it's just a new medium. Now communication is much faster.

You can reach a lot more people. So maybe the bubble itself the quote unquote bubble itself might be larger, but still, it's an aspect of just being human because we have so many examples of that throughout history you were talking about. smart Me: CEOs Reaching out even that I would argue that's not new I mean we have Warren Buffett where the or of Omaha when he does his investor day thing out in Nebraska it's the Talk of the Town the entire State basically shuts down to him, listen to him and Charlie Munger cuz like they have that much of a devoted following. So it has happened before.

it's going to happen again and another person that I want to bring up. and this is from what I'm hearing one of your new books is something related to Elon Musk People love Elon Musk Whether it's his Nurlink, his B boring, uh, whether it's Tesla whether it's just X of what's going on, he has a lot of people who follow and love what he does. Obviously, on the flip side of that, you're going to have a lot of people who dislikes it. I mean just before this I was listening to a Fame short seller Jim CH Chanos massively betting against Tesla as we speak as it's up I think 24% on the year.

so sometimes I feel like people are missing like the forest by from looking at the singular tree. So on that, uh, fully agree with you. but I'm also just seeing on your Twitter thread that you do have a new book coming out. Obviously the antisocial Network turned into dumb money.

Big success. You're coming out with a new book. What can you tell us about it? Yeah, so the new book is called Breaking Twitter and I guarantee you that it will be hated by half of you and loved by half of you. Play right? it.

can't wait into that story without, you know, uh, uh. pissing some people off. It really tells the story of Elon's takeover those six weeks from when he walks through the front door with a sink until um, basically, uh, you know a certain point where I feel like um Everything Changes I think that uh, it is one of the most complex takeovers in history and he's a really interesting, fascinating individual. Obviously there's the big bio about him out by Walther Isaacs and Elon which um I think is the authorized story that's the one Elon wants you to read.

This is not story that Elon wants you to read. Um, can't go much into it because it comes out in about five weeks and we're kind of gonna. There's a lot of stuff in there that no one has heard or seen before. A lot of secrets that, um, you know it will be interesting to see what people think of.

Um I'm fascinated by Elon and have been for a very long time and uh, I think that you know Twitter is the story of the moment X whatever you want to call it right now. Um, but I do think it's uh, it encapsulates a lot of what we're talking about and I think it's a natural progression from dumb money. Um, when you read the book, you'll see that. Um, there's a lot going on.

Let's just put it that way: Very excited. I'm definitely going to be pre-ordering it to be the I I mean I Enjoyed your previous book so much. I'm sure this one's going to be knocked out of the park. I Do have a question.

So in the US obviously you've dealt with influential people billionaires. You've dealt with oligarchs in Russia You've dealt with the Yakuza in Japan you've dealt with some pretty serious people and that they might be I guess nice people but also not necessarily they could actually be very, very dangerous people. How do you pull that off? Like how do are you calling them up and just emailing them and be like hey, can I hang out with you on your yacht or like I I just just don't understand how you kind of like bounce around and everyone's all right with you being so intertwined in their life. Well, they're not all all right with it.

I mean as an author I I do what I can to reach my sources and and hear it from them often I have to work around them I mean Mark Zuckerberg never talked to me for the Social Network Oh, he did talk to me, but he wouldn't let me interview him. He wasn't thrilled that I was writing the book. It's it's a it's a it's an interesting sort of thing when you're you know I'm a known quantity in terms of being a writer. So they know me.

They respond to me, but sometimes they don't want to talk to me. sometimes they're scared to talk to me. Sometimes they're afraid of what I'm going to write for the most part. I'm not trying to out anybody or just I'm just trying to tell their story.

Um, but I make it dramatic and I make it fun and I make it cinematic so some people want to talk to me, some people don't want to talk to me. Um, it's just part of the game I Think you know for me I'm trying to tell as authentic and true story as I can and yet make it cinematic and fun. Um, and some people like the way I write and some people don't. Um, and some people like to be written about by me and some people don't So we'll see.

uh, we'll see going forward I mean I've written about Russian oligarchs who were very scary people who pushed people off of ele you know out of elevators and things like that and then I've written about Zuckerberg and I've written about you know, billionaires like Ken Griffin and I've written about all sorts of people and um, you know every time out it's exciting and and scary and and great So we'll see. We'll see going forward if. uh, you know how how Elon reacts to this one. Um, hopefully he will see aspect aspects in it that he does like and understands and agrees with.

and there'll be aspects in it that he doesn't like and doesn't agree with. So um, we will see I guess when it comes out Beyond Excited! Well for anyone who wants to keep up with you, because obviously I'm sure you're not stopping here. So uh, how, what's the best way to connect with you? what's the best way to see like what you've been doing from day to day, yeah, Twitter X is still the best place to find me I'm I'm I just come to X and Ben mesri on X and you know um I I'm there all the time listening. although you know the account is crazy right now with the money so I may not see what you say but I'll try but I try to respond to people who are asking real questions and stuff like that um and uh and yeah, so that's that's the best place to find me I think for everyone listening, I'll make sure that's Linked In the description of this video so it's just one click away.

but uh Ben for me, the audience very much appreciate your time. Excited for this book, the movie, the next book, and whatever the exciting one is after that. So once again appreciate your time and hopefully we'll be talking soon. Thanks so much Thanks! thanks for talking to me! I Love it.