I'm Tobias Deml, the director of the HBO Max "Gaming Wall Street" docu-series. The doc is about Reddit memes, the revolution of retail investors and the dark underbelly of Wall Street. AMA!

How did you manage to snag Kieran Culkin as the narrator? It was a stroke of genius to use him!

This was a stroke of genius from HBO. We had a long list of potential narrators (who would have been more of a "voice of god", which I really didn't want) and they brought up Kieran; I had watched 3 episodes of Succession by then and it suddenly clicked - if the narrator was a character, then we wouldn't be pretentious and act as if we knew all information about the stock market.

The rest was just the usual industry stuff with agents and the network. He was super nice to work with and we recorded the VO together in a studio for about 6 hours.

Where do we go from here? Is there any hope of reform regarding things like payment for order flow / naked short selling? Or is it all untouchable?

I’m wondering if you think eyes have been opened widely enough for meaningful change, or if you think we need another, perhaps larger event like the GME squeeze to happen first. The retail investors are still creating pressure, but I’m skeptical that it’s enough.

Where do we go from here? We demand change through nonviolent social action. You can really look at investor rights as human rights - every human should have the right to a fair market, a fair place where they can grow their savings and reinvest the proceeds of their labor and efforts into companies they believe in, and create the economic future for the next generation.

I strongly believe that what happened in early 2021 triggered a groundswell of activism and spread of financial literacy that Wall Street has not seen before, certainly not at that scale. Also, January 2021 was a show of force - it woke a lot of Wall St firms up to realizing that there's a new power to be dealt with.

Retail investors coordinating with each other for systemic reform is the missing piece of the puzzle that can create the pressure cooker situation to force systemic change. Reform isn't dependent on stock movements, it's about social movements.

I would encourage everyone to check out two excellent initiative on the systemic reform side which we very intentionally feature on www.gamingwallstreet.org because we truly believe in them:

1. #WeTheInvestors is led by Dave Lauer - who is very sophisticated in understanding market structure issues - and is about retail investors joining forces in advocacy, and channeling the righteous anger about systemic inequities, lack of transparency, gaming of the system and exploitation of individual investors into a hardened, collective spear that can demand change.
2. www.bettermarkets.org is led by Dennis Kelleher - who is in "Gaming Wall Street", and Dennis is a force to be dealt with, directly in Washington DC. I think he has incredibly high integrity and his past experience in the U.S. Senate give him a unique understanding of the regulatory process and the unbelievable power of lobbying in DC. I think he creates a balancing force in the political process for market reform and can very much use the support of individual investors across the United States.

Change will take time. It's a marathon, not a sprint - but the arc of the universe doesn't just bend towards justice. It takes tenacity and unity to actively bend it towards justice.

Why is it a 2 episode “series” instead of just a 2 hour movie? Are there more episodes coming?

We always felt it had an episodic nature to it, and for some people that aren't as familiar with finance - I literally made the series with a very broad audience in mind - they need a breather, a way to either go to the bathroom or sleep over it for a night, and then have enough headspace for the next episode.

More episodes - that all depends on what happens next. I think there are a lot of interesting things happening, like the unprecedented amount of DRSing that's happening in GME (that's a historical first); there's a great movement towards market reform with #WeTheInvestors, and Tobin Mulshine's whistleblowing opens the potential gates for other whistleblowers to come forward.

For example, I already know of the architect of one of the major naked shorting tools that Wall Street used less than 10 years ago.

It's all on the table, but I can't say for sure. What I do know is that the rest of the story is in all of our hands, and the future will not just be written by the Wall Street powers that be. And having 2 episodes certainly gives us the chance to make more. ;-)

Hey Tobias! Loved the documentary. Just curious but why are all of these documentaries/movies framing this as a past event when it's a present one? Is it a fear of lawsuits or being accused of stock manipulation?

Thank you so much! I would say it's common in documentaries to have a past tense feel to things since they need to be evergreen.

In our specific case, I can give you a few examples: I would have loved to include a storyline about the SEC's most powerful initiative to date to monitor short selling activity, the Transparency in Securities Lending rule ( https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-239 ), but that rule might be passed or not passed in a year or two and then the documentary would be automatically outdated.

Also, I very specifically included lines in the ending of Episode 2, and if you listen closely, there are a lot of reminders that the story is not over - including, but not limited to, the narrator literally saying "This story is not over. This is just the beginning".

Speculating on the future of any particular stock would have been problematic - that's more what hype videos, DD or bearish reports are for; I saw our responsibility to truthfully chronicle what happened, what the underpinning issues were, what the illegal or shady dealings consisted of, and what was required of us, as the audience, to create a better future.

Harvey Pitt summed it up, and that's what we structured our call to action around: "An educated investor is our best weapon".

The rest of this story remains to be written, by people like yourself. :-)

Are you worried not enough eyes will see the documentary since it's on HBOMax?

HBO Max has north of 73 million subscribers world-wide, that's far more than I could have ever imagined a complicated financial topic and sensitive fraud analysis would get. :)

Are you dissapointed with just 86 comments in 6 hours here?

Would you consider an AMA on SuperStonk tomorrow? We promise to flood you with hundreds of comments (most may be less intelligent, but MORE fun!)

I'm open to doing one on Superstore if the mods can host it :)

Were you ever offered any money to not release the series or have been threatened since you did?

Great question!
Not yet.

I believe the strategy of the people/firms who know what they did was wrong, and understand that our documentary is exposing their questionable dealings have chosen the route of "ignore them unless this gets too big". It was similar with Michael Lewis when he released "Flash Boys" - initially they tried to ignore him until he made it onto prime time financial TV to talk about it; then the strategy was to discredit him.

I do have to say, given the sensitive topic, HBO Max has been very supportive of us reporting factual truth; the fact-checking process was reflective of the journalistic integrity to hold powerful firms accountable through making public information accessible.

Are you on the rocket?

If you're asking if I own GME or AMC - yes, both.

Great intro to the story, thank you for your work!

The text on screen at the close under Dr. Trimbath indicated that she inspired investors to “take 5.2 million shares away from brokers, making it impossible to loan to short sellers.”

Since this is the entire premise of the fraud described in the documentary, why is this not a central focus? It sounds like you are describing the solution but give it no more attention than a brief mention at the end.

What did she inspire people to do, exactly?

You're welcome!

Great question, and I got that question about DRS a lot.

Basically, DRS is very complicated to explain properly, and the implications of a large percentage of shares being DRS'd is technically unknown because it's never happened to this degree before. As far as I'm aware, GameStop is the most DRS'd company - at least by market value - in the history of DRS being a market function.

It was one of the topics that we didn't have enough real estate for in the runtime, and the resources to both explain it and then also journalistically explore it; it would have at least taken a ComputerShare interview, a bunch of additional animation etc.

Instead, I opted to still give DRS a mention in the coda, and give Susanne the credit she deserves for really kickstarting the spread of knowledge about DRS to this generation of retail investors.

Also, the systemic solutions are, among multiple approaches, a disciplined settlement regime that Susanne advocates for fervently. All of this takes time to explain to an audience, so I trusted that the portion of the audience that has interest in systemic reform to use the doc as a research springboard and go on their own journey, which many have (from joining #WeTheInvestors to joining subreddits to writing letters to the SEC, DOJ or their congressional representatives).

Will GME make me rich?

Only the future holds the answer to that question. :-)

What one thing do you wish you could have covered more if you had an unlimited budget and runtime?

So many things. I would have liked to cover a lot more about overvoting, explained the world of short selling and hedge fund operations better (we had some fantastic stories around the VW Squeeze); I would have had time to explain the significance of Ryan Cohen and Michael Burry as activist investors better but go much deeper into the history of investor activism around GameStop's turnaround (which started way earlier, with Hestia Capital and Permit Capital partners - https://news.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-release-details/gamestop-announces-agreement-hestia-capital-and-permit ).

Would have loved to get the time to get inside testimony of Melvin Capital, and what January 15-27 felt like inside of Melvin; get the reports of the SenVests of the world (the whales on the long side that made hundreds of millions but are still under SEC scrutiny), and of course, take the time to get a high ranking options specialist from Citadel to tell us what happened on January 27 and 28th.

I would have liked to get the inside on who at the DTCC took part in deciding on the capital requirements and knowingly cause price action through predictable PCOing, and what their ethical considerations were (if any).

There would have been time to explain DRS, and the various theories and implications around it. Maybe we could have gotten an inside look at what happened with Melvin's short position after the prime broker sold it off to the bidder.

The list goes on and on. We have thousands of pages of research, had an investigative journalist on our team, and I know there's still so much under the hood over at ShareIntel.

Hopefully more will be revealed by additional journalists that take the factual reality seriously; while we went really deep on some topics, we just scratched the surface in some places.

Congrats on the series! Going through the process, what single thing surprised you the most about this saga?

The biggest surprise was that naked short selling wasn't a Reddit conspiracy theory. I clearly remember being on a video call with John and Burke, our producing partners and Wall Street insiders, and me saying something to the extent of
"ok, here's all these cooky things people on Reddit are saying", and when I got to naked short selling, John looked straight at the camera, totally nonchalant, and said "Oh no, that's a real thing. I even know these guys down the street who research that stuff. And I had trouble with that at a past company".

​

The deeper I went, the crazier these "WTF" moments were, talking off the record to real insiders who I cannot name, revealing how much dirty laundry there was and still is on Wall Street.

GME ape checking in, what were you most surprised to learn about in doing research leading up to the production of this series? What sparked your desire to direct it?

Where were you January 28th 2021... haha

I answered the first thing above in more detail - I was most surprised that Naked Short Selling was a real thing. And overvoting.

My desire to direct this? Well, I've been sitting in the wings for the last 10 years or so, keeping my head down and directing commercials or producing films at my production company www.prodigium-pictures.com , or filming for other directors as a cinematographer. It's very common that people go through film school and then get a big head, think they're the next Spielberg, and want to do a feature film or a TV series. More often than not, they're nowhere close to ready, and I felt like I wasn't ready.

I felt like I would find the right project eventually - no rush. And then, 10 years later, when I discovered WSB, I thought to myself "this is a crazy subculture on the internet that nobody has ever heard of before" (which would change like 4 months after that when it became the #1 headline in finance) "and I don't know a single person in my environment that could do a better job at directing a doc about an internet subculture that's mashed up with finance and profanities".
Once the buy button was shut off and I smelled that something fishy was going on, there was no way back for me. I had written most of the Wikipedia article on "legal" financial fraud, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_accounting , and love digging into things that look benign but have a dark side to them, and dividing fact from (fan) fiction; sprucing up the conspiracy theories from the actually real shady dealings.

​

On January 28th, I was at the office, completely stunned by what just happened, and was like "my dad warned me, I should sell... he said that was not going to last, but I think not even he saw this coming".
I held. That day was very red. ;-)
(and for full disclosure, I haven't sold or added to the position since then since I felt like it was an ethical issue to do anything with the position once I started telling a story about it)

Did you see the video of DFV watching your doc on the big screen? :)

I believe he was watching "GameStop: Rise of the Players" in a movie theater. He was friends with a bunch of the people in that film, so it was probably quite nostalgic, and I think Jonah did a very good job with portraying Keith as well (even though we had different approaches).

But great seeing a sign of life from him!

Why was Ramona Ortega included in the story? Her inclusion didn't seem to further the story in any way that I could find.

Ramona invested both in GameStop and AMC, and made a good deal of money on both (I believe she sold most of her position at opportune times). She was one of the very few people we found in our research, outreach and interviews - we considered hundreds of stories to included - who bridges the gap between being at the SEC, being a retail investors, being an investment educator and a fervent activist and advocate for financial literacy and intergenerational wealth.

She was the only character in the show that directly worked on prosecuting Bernie Madoff (who is both the poster child of undiscovered Wall Street crime, and has had a history of naked short selling), and she brought another important story to the table: the inequities of market access, which classically kept women and people of color away from the table of Wall Street.

Ramona also had a cautionary voice to her, a "don't gamble with your life savings", a bit of an antithesis to WSB, but we didn't have enough time to include that with the right nuance.

We could do a whole documentary on Ramona, and I hope more women of color will follow her footsteps. Investing and being financially literate is all about transcending social strata and bettering your own life and that of your family. She's a shining example of that.

Gotcha, thank you for the response. I didn't realize she had even invested a cent into either of them. I personally wish that would have been more front an center to the story. To me the diversity, equity and inclusion that people like Larry Fink are pushing was front and center with her. It's sort of like how the current administration is saying Janet Yellen is the first woman to hold the position as secretary of the treasury. If you know anything about her, that's the least interesting thing about her.

Representation is an essential part of storytelling (and also the real world), but yeah, totally get it. We had to cut a lot of Ramona's personal investing perspectives out to keep out the overall story moving and give that enough space so people can follow.

It's a really hard balance to strike, using that limited real estate!

What created the enormous time pressure?

Netflix. And Jonah Tulis, who actually beat us to the punch!

For those that aren't familiar with it - we started our little documentary with very humble means and initially were focused on the crazy world of WallStreetBets - then GameStop exploded and by February 2021 there were like 8 documentary projects announced on this subject, some of them simply based on the headlines that happened. So it was a race against time - both to get the story right, and to get it done.

For the most part retail understands that the big players in the market are the same ones who donate millions to politicians and lawmakers, as well as pretty much being a fiend overwatching the agencies that should regulate them. With that being said, how does the average peasant (because I'm sure thats how they see us) go about forcing legitimate change? These big guys in and around wall street have the average population by the pretty little pearls. They control and format everything from routing trades and synthetic dilution of securities and equities to using one's personal banking and savings accounts (and retirement funds) as a means of collateral to do what they wish. Entities like Cede and Co. literally govern themselves with no oversight, nor do any of these entities operate in the best interest of whom they provide services too unless said serviced entity benefits those providers. When you lift up the curtain, you can see the nobles on their thrones of cash and deceit tossing pennies to the people in the street. All while claiming we should suck it up and be grateful that we even get scraps. The average person is fed up with them and other than exposing what they're doing on paper, how do we win?

/#wetheinvestors, better markets, and Wall Street on parade are the angles im keeping an eye on.

Great choices.

Just to avoid double answers, I covered the action steps you're asking about pretty extensively here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tt4zic/im_tobias_deml_the_director_of_the_hbo_max_gaming/i2vt8nt?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tt4zic/im_tobias_deml_the_director_of_the_hbo_max_gaming/i2wber5?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

Hi there, thanks for this AMA! I’d like to know, did you contact anyone at GameStop - RC, Finestone, etc? Did they respond?

Also, will there be a part 3 post-MOASS? 😏🏴‍☠️

Yes, we reached out to GameStop and RC often, in different avenues. They either didn't respond or ended up deciding to not be involved; I'm sure they had their reasons.

And, will there be a part 3 post-MOASS?

I can't guarantee it, but there are lots of interesting threads to follow for a third or fourth part in this story. I'm still staying as updated as I can; in an earlier question I answered what some of these threads are!

Thanks for ur kind reply. Will you do a 3rd episode about the Stock split and share dividend that Gamestop has just annouced in their 8k filing they will do?

Can't promise anything - but I am tracking all developments as closely as I can, to see where the next chapter of the story goes.

Hello Tobias! I think you did a great job and made it very easy to understand while keeping my attention glued.

During your research into the film, did Boston Consulting Group come up anywhere in relation to Wall Street??

i.e. BCG consults with the Federal Reserve, and recently members of BCG have been identified as joining failing companies' Board of Directors and help bankrupt them.

It seems to the hand in hand with the bankruptcy jackpot theory, if my memory serves right and you mentioned that in the series.

Thanks in advance

No, Boston Consulting Group never came up. Even on Reddit, I only saw them a week or two ago for the first time. BCG and McKinsey are global operations that have their tentacles and clients everywhere.

You could draw a lot of connections to what BCG might be involved in or do, but I think it's relatively unlikely that they're playing a particular role. They usually sustain their business model by making companies more efficient (which can often be through brutal layoffs and ethically questionable things), and then garnering a reputation for turnaround. I could imagine that that's a reason a number of struggling businesses hired them on their last legs, and BCG simply failed in turning them around.

One thing I can confirm is that both the income of a short seller drastically improves if a company they bet against goes bankrupt. They made the money on selling the shares at whatever price they were, then paid the rate to borrow on a monthly basis, and if the company goes bankrupt, there's no shares they need to buy back - so the only cost is the rate to borrow.

Did Keith answer when you knocked on his door? Hope he's doing well.

I want to preserve his privacy here, but we politely knocked on his door two times. Tessa and myself drove for 4 hours from NYC to a suburb outside of Boston to personally ask him if he'd be willing to tell his story.

He didn't answer the door so we left a hand written postcard, and never contacted him again after that. I believe he's well, someone on Reddit had posted a picture a few months ago of him being at a running event, and his brother posted a clip of him watching one of the GameStop movies in a movie theater.

Keith is by far one of the kindest and most generous financial educators on YouTube, and despite him not replying to our request, we really wanted to get him right - both in his thesis about GameStop, as well as him as a human, so we archived all 84 hours worth of his videos and tried to give him the fairest portrayal possible.

Why won’t congress ask the SEC to do anything?

This is a really complicated question. Great one though.

I talked with former U.S. Senator Ted Kaufmann on the phone, for research purposes on what systemic reform should look like. Ted was one of the people that fought naked short selling in 2008 and advocated fervently for systemic reform on the heels of Wall Street nearly blowing up the global economy. All of this is well chronicled in a book I read in order to do this documentary (Lucy Komisar gave me the tip), called "The Payoff" by Jeff Connaughton who worked closely with Ted Kaufman.

But in essence, despite Kaufmann entering into a bipartisan coalition with other Senators (this was all the way up), other senators felt that their reform ideas were too radical, and watered down or entirely struck down their proposals for amendment (the most famous being the Brown-Kaufmann amendment); what was left was put into law as a few smaller bills and the main financial reform bill, Dodd Frank: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dodd-frank-financial-regulatory-reform-bill.asp

Dodd-Frank lacked teeth, Reg SHO lacked teeth (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/regsho.asp - not to dismiss it in any way, it's the best thing we have right now) so Kaufmann and his fellow senators that believed that reform needed to go further reached out to the SEC chairwoman Mary Shapiro with a letter they wrote together.

Shapiro did not act on their request, she seemed to have been very conservative or didn't care about their plight.

Long story, but the takeaway is:

If you have people in the senate or at the head of the SEC being unwilling to implement common sense reforms, that resistance will prolong the power of the banks unless the public is educated on the issue and push back. Making noise leads to media coverage, and that creates real pressure and accountability.

A great example is this current movement, which led to Jon Stewart's awesome episode and him holding Gary Gensler accountable. Keep it up, use collective action like #WeTheInvestors, and the system will eventually change once the people in charge have no choice but to listen to public demand.

What do you think Gamestop Board should do to protect their shareholders, did you invit them to be part of the documentary?

We spent a great deal of time reaching out to Ryan Cohen and people at GameStop corporate, both to ask for Ryan to be in the documentary, and for GameStop as a company to analyze their OBO/NOBO balance through ShareIntel to see if there are more significant indicators of naked short selling.

They unfortunately didn't participate; I'm sure they have their reasons, and sometimes it's easier to not know if you have a problem than to know and then figure out what is in the best interest of the firm and the shareholders (which sometimes isn't disclosing that the bank you're relying on for loans might also be naked short lending your shares).

Hi! Great doc! I noticed a slide where there was Suzanne T. who inspired retail investors to take 5.2 million gamestop shares away from the brokers, referring to DRSing shares through computershare. Owning AMC too, how do you feel about the biggest AMC sub on Reddit banning anyone mentioning DRS?

I don't know the particular motivations of why they might have banned it.

I think DRS is a really interesting movement within GameStop - I know that within the GME community there were months of discussions before it started gaining broader acceptance, so this might be Reddit community dynamics.

Sup Tobias. What made you interested in this stuff? Were you invested in Gamestop before January 2021, or did it catch your attention at the same time it caught everyone else's?

I got really interested in WallStreetBets in the Fall of 2020, and wanted to make a documentary about the community. By January, I had reached out to Keith Gill because GameStop was one of the many wild ideas on WSB that I figured would have a fun backstory, and suddenly the whole thing just exploded and was all over the news.

Hello Tobias, in the documentary you adress DRS but never name it (if I remember well). Was it a conscious choice from your part?

I answered that in detail in an earlier question! https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/tt4zic/comment/i2w6fjb/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3

You mentioned naked short selling surprised you most. What about dark pools ?

Yeah, dark pools are odd but not outright fraudulent, or not fraudulent by design (unlike naked short selling). What is interesting is the abuse of dark pools, which their architecture really enables quite well; we have studied a long list of violations where various large banks abused their dark pools for trading customer money at less-than-best execution, traded customer funds in dark pools even though they were obligated to trade them on-exchange, the list goes on.

A good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark\_pool

It's one of the many areas in finance that needs reform, and I think Jon Stewart did a great job with shining a light into that area.

What are your thoughts on apes attempt to expose counterfeit shares via Direct Registering their shares to remove them from the DTCC? It seems like the best form of protest, no?

Also, do you have any thoughts on the recent activity surrounding GameStop stock? Between the halt that happened Tuesday morning that showed a bid/ask of $0.02 and $448,000.00, and the fact that IBKR is having technical issues processing options for GME and other stocks that start with G?

Thank you for your incredible work. It is the most accurate representation of what's been going on that I've seen. Looking forward to the next part. 😉

I am pretty certain that at least a few people at DTCC are scratching their head about the DRS movement within GameStop. It's historically unprecedented, and certainly a form of protest that goes deep into the market structure in a sophisticated way. It's unpredictable what it might cause, but it sucks even theoretical liquidity out of the market and is reaching levels close to 10 million shares now; adding that up with insider shares, it does put a pretty sizeable choke on the overall supply of shares. I could imagine that it will come to a place where people on the market will start seeing it as a problem, and that might create some leverage for market reform. It's certainly shareholder activism at its finest, albeit a very elaborate form of protest.As far as I am aware, there's never been such a movement in the history of direct registration, and Susanne takes a solid deal of credit together with Redditors like Pink, for informing a larger crowd of the technical possibility.

In terms of the things that happened on Tuesday, Dave Lauer and the Urvin Terminal team has plausible explanations on most of it; the Interactive Brokers bulletin notice seemed very strange to me and was reminiscent of Jan. 2021. I don't want to speculate too much there and don't have any particularly convincing data, but multiple odd things have happened again recently, like both GME and AMC doubling out of nowhere.

And thank you for the compliment! Our team was incredibly dedicated to tell the story accurately, both from a human/emotional side (I could draw from my own experiences hodling GME and AMC through the Jan 2021 spike) as well as from the technical/systemic/shadow side, so it's been very rewarding to get positive feedback on our efforts there!

What more do you think need to be seen or done for regulatory agencies or any regulatory party to step in and stop another implosion of the debt market?

Great question. I think it will take a criminalization of financial negligence. If individual jail time is on the menu for concocting irresponsible financial structures, it'll be a lot less attractive to do it. What happened in 2008 could plausibly happen again, because the laws and regulations are not strict enough and the accountability is not individualized enough. For the more libertarian readers under us: The allowed leverage is far too great and poses systemic risk.

In order for the regulators to act, they need to feel the pressure from the public. Organizing is everything - and while it's against the law to organize around a particular stock (i.e. to pump it), it's more than legal to organize around an advocacy issue. That's what #WeTheInvestors and similar efforts are for - channeling public pressure into political change.

When will it be available in Latin America? I looked for it and it's not available in my region yet :/

I just emailed with the HBO Max team on this. It is definitively confirmed to come to HBO Max LatAm, but there's unfortunately no date just yet.