🤥 Everyone's Just Making Stuff Up

Social Media Killed the Works Cited Page and Everything is Professional Wrestling — Plus, Temu Parent Company's Earnings Land Another Blow to Ultra-Discount Retail

Author

Katie Perry
March 22, 2025

Welcome to Tuesday Thursday Saturday! I share a snapshot of trending stories across business, tech, and culture three times a week. Subscribe and tell me what you want to hear about next! - KP

The Big Story: Nobody Wants the Bibliography

Scroll X for five seconds and you’ll see it: people talking wild. Full-throated, no hesitation, no sourcing. Just making stuff up and doing it with confidence. It’s kind of amazing. Also, insane. Because a lot of people... just go with it?

In college, I studied journalism and once had dreams of being an embedded journalist. I was trained to back up every claim. No opinion without evidence. No stat without a source. So yeah, I have a visceral reaction to people who post opinions as facts without a second thought. Let’s call them what they are: bullshit artists.

We all have access to the Internet. To basic GenAI tools. To things like Deep Research, which can spit out a well-sourced book report in five minutes (and helped inform today’s writeup — it’s 13 pages long and you can read it here). Platforms give us plenty of real estate — comments, threads, long-form posts — to indicate where we got the information we’re sharing. Yet we often don’t.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about bibliographies, works cited pages, and the Dewey Decimal System. All the things Millennials like myself were trained to obsess over. Despite having more access to more sources than ever, they just don’t seem to matter anymore. Nobody cares.

So, when did everyone become bullshit artists? Let’s start with the psychology.

  • We’re wired to trust confidence. It’s called the “confidence heuristic” â€” if someone sounds like they know what they’re talking about, we tend to believe them. Even if they’re confidently wrong. Confidence feels like truth.

  • Then there’s the “illusory truth effect.” If you repeat something often enough, it starts to sound right. This effect has been proven across multiple studies and is most evident in politics — although a core tenet of persuasive corporate communications is the use of simple messaging that can be repeated over and over.

  • Add some good old-fashioned “confirmation bias” to the mix — where we believe what supports our views — and you've got the recipe for viral nonsense.

But our ability to accept BS is cultural as much as it’s psychological. Back in the day, finding answers meant opening books. Digging through sources. Using Microsoft Encarta ‘98 (real ones know!). 

Shout out to Jim Perry

Today, we can access more information faster than ever — and somehow we’re fact-checking less. Make it make sense! Blame the 24/7 news cycle and the scroll economy, because, honestly, who has time to Google the counterpoint? U.S. adults are spending 52 minutes/day on TikTok, mind you.

Social media turns every conversation into performance art. Call it the WWE-ification of Everything. It’s all for the clicks, the views, the spectacle. Everything these days has an aura of professional wrestling.

Ah, the iconic Tombstone!

Oxford’s word of the year NINE YEARS AGO (2016) was “post-truth,” defined as circumstances “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Fast-forward to 2025 and despite our nearly decade-long self-awareness, somehow things are worse. Fake facts are still accepted because some cable TV big mouth or boisterous blue check shouts loudly and in a way that validates your worldview.

Of course, we’ve also lost trust in institutions — media, experts, academics— so we outsource credibility to people who look like us, talk like us, and post confidently … whether or not they know what they’re talking about. According to a Gallup poll, only 32% of Americans say they trust the mass media "a great deal" or "a fair amount." I have MANY thoughts on this specific topic, which I will save for a future edition…

Alas, but not all hope is lost! Community Notes are a step in the right direction. I’m all for letting the wisdom of the crowd correct terrible takes in real-time. But even this comes with a hilarious twist. The guy who owns the platform that rolled out the feature? Just ask his own AI super-app, he’s one of the biggest bullshit artists around!

Awkward.

I once read that the best leaders aren’t afraid to ask for help. It takes confidence to admit what you don’t know. It takes balls to NOT be a bullshit artist. 

The truth is quieter. It’s more boring. It doesn’t scream at you in CAPS. But it still matters.

Daily Rip Live Recap: Duke is Nvidia, Nike Falls to Lowest Share Price Since 2020, and Forever 21 Gets 86-ed

Every weekday, Shay Boloor and I run down the biggest market news and events LIVE on Stocktwits’ morning show, The Daily Rip Live. Here’s what we recently covered on the show.

  • March Madness is upon us! Shay and I compare NCAA teams to stocks. Duke is Nvidia, UConn is Apple, and St. John’s is … Alphabet in a few years? If we’re talking the women’s bracket though, Notre Dame is the clear Nvidia. They put up 106 points the other day. LFG. | CLIP $NVDA ( ▲ 3.62% )  $AAPL ( ▲ 1.84% )  $GOOG ( ▲ 2.38% )  

  • Soon-to-be-public Klarna announced a controversial partnership with DoorDash. There is indeed something dark about the concept of Buy Now Pay Later-ing an $18 burrito, although if you read the announcement comms closely they seem to be emphasizing groceries more than takeout. All of this reminded me of commentary from Walmart’s February earnings call — where they referenced some data indicating that things are getting tighter for American families, e.g. cutting back on spend as the month comes to end. $KLAR ( 0.0% )  $DASH ( ▲ 3.33% )  

  • Nike reported earnings, and investors weren’t impressed. Despite a refocus on brand marketing, accelerated product development, and a new collab with Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS, the stock is back at its lowest point since March 2020. Still, there we some signs of life and sentiment on Stocktwits is neutral. $NKE ( ▲ 1.9% )  

  • Temu’s parent company Pinduoduo is going through it after reporting weak revenues. On the show, Shay reasons that the competition for super-discount items is too great and they don’t really have a moat. He compares PDD to Alibaba, which has a cloud business and operates as an ecosystem and now just an online storefront. You’ll also recall that Amazon also has its own tab of ridiculously cheap things that you definitely do not need. The race to the bottom is getting ugly, with Forever 21 filing for Chapter 11 this week, blaming Shein and Temu for their demise. [Editor’s note: Gen Z will never understand the absolute high of leaving work at 5 pm on a Friday and immediately buying a $9 “going out top” from F21 to debut at Brother Jimmy’s.] $PDD ( ▲ 2.83% )  $BABA ( ▲ 0.27% )  $AMZN ( ▲ 3.29% )  

  • Also, it kind of felt like a quiet week at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — although it’s all relative, isn’t it? We did get a quick Truth Social outburst following the Fed’s decision to keep rates constant, which immediately killed the vibe after a short-lived rally.

Hear Shay and I yap about the markets every weekday at 9 a.m. ET on X (@stocktwits), YouTube, LinkedIn, or in your Stocktwits app. Follow me there — I’m @stocktwitsKP!

Now Here’s a Chart

Working and middle-class families are feeling the recession pinch, but golfers gonna golf!* Over on X, Jeff Macke cites a “flight to golf,” and shares this chart showing Topgolf Callaway Brands’ stock up 10% this week. $MODG ( ▲ 3.64% )  

*After accidentally crashing the rehearsal dinner of a Spanish monarch last night, I can confirm that the ultra-wealthy are proceeding as normal.

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Tuesday Thursday Saturday is written by Katie Perry, owner of Ursa Major Media, which provides fractional marketing services and strategy in software, tech, consumer products, professional services, and other industries. She is also the co-host of Stocktwits’ Daily Rip Live show.

Disclaimer: The contents here reflect recaps and summaries of pre-reported or published data, news, and trends. I have cited sources and context for the information provided to the best of my ability. The purpose of the newsletter is to inform and educate on larger trends shaping business and culture — this is NOT investment advice. As an investor, you should always do your own research before making any decisions about your money or your portfolio.