The Insanity of the Markets with Ben & Emil

Summary

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Better Offline — "The Insanity of the Markets with Ben & Emil"

Podcast: Better Offline, Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts
Host: Ed Zitron
Guests: Ben & Emil ("Ben and Emil Show")
Date: May 13, 2026
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Episode Overview

In this episode, Ed Zitron hosts Ben and Emil—two prominent voices from the "Ben and Emil Show"—to dissect the current state of financial markets, the madness of "finance Twitter," and the strange cycles of hype underpinning tech stocks, retail investment, and meme-driven trading. Together, they reflect on the ways the internet has supercharged collective speculation and disconnected market trends from economic fundamentals, drawing sharp lines between what’s real and what’s hype. From crypto to Korean retail traders, and from AI bottlenecks to the next possible "bubble," this candid, often hilarious discussion paints a vivid picture of an investing environment that's become more casino than market.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Finance Twitter: From Siloed Forums to Hive Mind Insanity

• Evolution of Financial Discourse Online

  • Finance discussions have centralized on Twitter, evolving from disparate message boards (Yahoo Finance, Investors Hub, etc.) into a real-time, volatile hive mind.
  • Market sentiment is now easily gauged via daily Twitter posts, with narratives rotating quickly—often in response to world events, tweets, or simply trending sectors.
    Quote:

  "Twitter is the single. It's a hive mind... you can gauge the sentiment so easily just on finance Twitter." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [05:00]

• Whiplash News Cycles

  • Discussions whip from oil prices, to war headlines, to semiconductor ETFs ("soxx") in days.
  • Events are rapidly "priced in" or dismissed, and many moves appear disconnected from news. Quote:

  "It just doesn't matter anymore because now the narrative has shifted. Everybody's focused on memory stocks and semiconductors." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [05:49]

2. Retail Frenzy, Meme Stocks, and Herd Patterns

• Rise of Retail Power and Collective Trades

  • Korean retail traders cited as global market movers; their favorite U.S. stocks/ETFs can go parabolic, defying logic or fundamentals.
  • The Robinhood effect and online communities—sometimes more rabid than crypto evangelists—now play out across traditional equities (AMC, etc.). Quote:

  "All these dudes, they're all looking at Korean names that don't have ticker symbols—they have numbers... and they're just these companies that, that trade at way, way lower multiples than American stocks." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [21:00]

• The “Pain Trade”

  • Markets have a perverse tendency to move where it will “piss off the most people,” trapping latecomers or shorts in cycles of regret and frustration. Quote:

  "Whatever move will piss off the most people, including myself, is just sideways and up for the remainder of the summer." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [10:04]

• Disconnected From Reality

  • Most participants know the fundamentals look shaky but are compelled by relentless upward movement, automated 401k flows, and fear of missing out (FOMO). Quote:

  "It feels like everything is disconnected from reality at this point." — Ben [11:59]

3. Crypto, AI, and the Eternal Search for the Next "Thing"

• Behavioral Echoes of the Crypto Boom

  • Stock market hype cycles now borrow the frenetic evangelism and pump/dump tactics once central to altcoins and NFTs.
  • Many crypto traders have simply switched to momentum plays in AI, semiconductors, and Asian equities. Quote:

  "This is just crypto. It's the same fucking shit." — Ben [18:24]
  "Fart coin is fucking dead, man." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [20:21]
  (a playful nod to the absurdity of past flavors of hype)

• Anecdotes of Winners and "YOLO" FOMO

  • Stories circulate of retail traders turning five-figure stakes into millions, typically by ignoring caution and buying whatever's being hyped the hardest on social media. Quote:

  “Guys like that are blessed because they don’t have the experience necessary to be cautious.” — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [26:13]

4. Cycles of Hype: Sectors, Trends, and Narrative Investing

• The Memeification of Market Narratives
  • Sectors spike as Twitter discards one narrative for the next: memory stocks, AI bottlenecks, CPUs/GPUs, quantum computing, robotics, space, etc.
  • Retail interest is highly thematic and self-reinforcing; logic or fundamentals rarely matter. Quote:

  "If the whole AI thing goes bust, I don't think we're even going to see this, like, bubble bursting that everyone's expecting. Everyone's just going to start being like, robotics is what it all is now... and we're all just going to keep..." — Emil [48:38]

5. The Casino Economy: Gambling, Sentiment, and the End of Fundamentals

• Markets as Casino

  • The language of trading—seeking "alpha," chasing momentum, getting "burned" or "hosed"—blurs lines between investing and gambling.
  • Automated investing, social momentum, and low-friction apps increase detachment from risk and reality. Quote:

  "This market is the most griftable in the world." — Ben [30:34]
  "It just doesn't feel like I'm buying anything when I have to double tap on the phone..." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [14:03]
  "Everything will be casino now. Except. No, that's an insult to my beautiful slot machines, which are fair..." — Ben [59:52]

• Sense of Doom and Resignation

  • Most agree that, eventually, reality must reassert itself—but no one knows when or what the catalyst will be.
  • Proposals for mass censorship (tongue-in-cheek), noting that regulatory fixes won't stem speculative mania. Quote:

  "I don't think there's any fixing this other than massive amounts of pain." — Ben [59:25]

6. Market Psychology: Narratives, Influencers, and Mental Health

• Vulnerability and Emotional Toll

  • Guests share personal tales of regret and self-recrimination; many retail investors' lives are shaped by single trades—some for the better, most for the worse.
  • Hype cycles create "winners" who subsequently become true believers, unable to perceive risk. Quote:

  “If I'd made, like, $10 million off of some insane trade I read on Twitter, I would begin to lose my grip on reality.” — Ben [53:36]

• The Impact of Social Media and Algorithms

  • The rise of anonymous influencers, Discords, and "cash-tag" spam barrage users with hype and FOMO.
  • The Twitter/X algorithm, shaped in part by Musk, is called out for fueling these cycles. Quote:

  “Once you click one cash tag... you are then inundated with all kinds of pumping tweets.” — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [56:04]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Perpetual Rotation of Hype:

  "Everybody just kind of shifts their focus on its rotation from sector to sector... right now, the big is AI bottlenecks." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [15:49]

• On Retail Market Power:

  "Substantial enough that it legitimately moves markets now. And I think that's so bad." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [27:51]

• On Emotional Investing:

  "There was no air conditioning in the building and it was always like 85 degrees... I'd been working for free. And I went and I sat in the bathroom..." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [39:16]
  (On the crushing impact of a bad trade.)

• On Market Logic:

  "You're thinking too rationally about it." — Emil [48:34]

• On Social Media’s Role:

  "We have a market that is somewhat dictated by Twitter psychopaths is really bad." — Ben [58:32]

• Tongue-in-Cheek Analysis:

  "I think the future should be mass censorship. I don't think we should have CNBC able to talk about stocks anymore." — Ben [59:25]
  "At least with the slot machines you have those fun sounds that are stimulating." — Guest Trader/Finance Expert [60:20]

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment / Topic Summary | |------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:07 | Start of real content, guest intros, show premise | | 03:20-07:36| Evolution of Finance Twitter—hive mind, whiplash narratives | | 08:05-09:46| Hype cycles, meme stocks, Korean market mania | | 11:59-14:09| Market disconnected from reality; psychological toll; buy-the-dip culture| | 17:56-20:21| Crypto-to-stock market behavioral parallels; retail rushes | | 21:00-22:24| Speculation on Korean stocks using new trading apps | | 26:13-27:31| Anecdote: YOLO success stories and FOMO psychology | | 29:14-32:25| Parallels to Enron and past bubbles | | 39:16-40:47| Personal losses and emotional extremes (bathroom story) | | 46:08-48:34| Reflections on giving advice, irrationality, logic vs. market cycles | | 48:38-49:43| “Robotics is next” — shifting narratives in tech investing | | 53:36-54:19| True believers, winner's psychosis, Cathie Wood and ARK phenomenon | | 56:04-57:35| The cash tag algorithm, bots and pump spam | | 58:32-59:09| “Market dictated by Twitter psychopaths” and the death of fundamentals | | 59:25-60:58| Censorship as a joke fix; casino slot machine metaphors | | 61:34-62:05| Where to find Ben & Emil — cross-promotion |

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Tone & Language

• Candid, irreverent, self-aware, and skeptical.
• Jokes, self-deprecation, and gallows humor abound—especially about personal mistakes and the irrationality of tech/finance culture.
• Language is conversational, often profane, and peppered with internet references; the tone balances genuine critique with a sense of fun and incredulity.

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Useful for Listeners Who Missed the Episode

• Get a grounded sense of current market madness and the social forces behind it—no buzzwords or bland analysis, just real talk from pros-turned-skeptics.
• Understand how rapidly-changing online narratives (on Twitter/X and elsewhere) now have concrete, sometimes dangerous effects on global markets.
• Insight into retail investor psychology, the cyclical nature of market themes, and the ways "casino logic" now dominates even supposedly serious finance.
• Learn why even the experts are often at a loss—and why, as Emil says, “the irrationality of all of it is impossible to account for.”

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For the true flavor and all the laughs, it's best heard in the original episode—but this summary captures everything serious (and seriously funny) that the hosts and guests covered.

Transcript

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[Emil]

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[Ben]

Mimamo Red Zitron and this is Better offline. Better offline. Download a T shirt or subscribe to the newsletter using the links in the profile notes to support the greater Zitron crusades. But today I'm joined by two of the finest finance podcasters alive. That's right. We've got Ben and Emil from the Ben and Emil Show. Fellas, thank you for joining me.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Wow. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. The applause and you can't see we're both. We're both wearing matching gray shirts today.

[Emil]

Yeah, we didn't.

[Ben]

Yeah, they've. And you can't see this cause it's not a video podcast. But they are actually at their studio space with the two desks. These guys have the actual. I love Ben and Emile's setup. They have a real studio with clocks and everything. Oh, yeah, I can't draw one of those.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

We spent $100,000 on this studio and it's just a money pit we keep throwing money at, much like people keep throwing money at these memory stocks. Am I right?

[Ben]

Whoa.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Geez Louise. These Kareems.

[Ben]

Now, this whole conversation started, though, with you and me, Ben, talking about how finance Twitter is this new insane thing. And I've been. I'm relatively new to it. I feel like you douse yourself in it fairly often. But my process when I go on and read finance Twitter now is just seeing how many people are going insane in a particular day and what they're going insane about.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And it's usually an Axios article about oil.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, oil these days, it doesn't matter anymore. I mean, I am. I'm really, really dialed in on finance Twitter, and I have been for a long time. And it's become a really, really fascinating place. I was just ruminating on this last night because it used to be. Sorry, here comes a rant. It used to be disjointed, right? It used to be when I first was coming up in trading in 2009 and all the way through like 2015, there was finance Twitter, sure, but you still had Yahoo. Finance message boards. You had. There was Investors Investors Hub was another one. But that was mostly for penny stocks. There are a bunch of other little ones, but now Twitter is the single. It's a hive mind. And it's. I was having trouble kind of putting it into words or putting my thoughts together last night, but it really is like you can gauge the sentiment so easily just on finance Twitter. And yeah, the market was carrying the market just. It's like a child with add and it loses its focus. All it takes is a couple weeks. Whereas just a perfect example a month ago or whenever this whole war invasion started, everybody was hanging on every single word that Trump said. And Trump tweeted. And now it's just old news. It just doesn't. And depending on who you ask. Oh, it's priced in. The market is forward looking and that's. Is it a function of people just looking for a story afterward to excuse and explain the fact that the market doesn't care anymore? I don't know. But yeah, it just doesn't seem to care. Yeah. Brent crude is at like, last I checked, like 110 a barrel. And a month ago that would have spelled disaster for the S and P. But now it just doesn't. It doesn't matter anymore because now the narrative has shifted. Everybody's focused on memory stocks and semiconductors. The sox, the semiconductor etf has just been on a parabolic run.

[Ben]

And that's just a group of different. For the, for the audience. That's just a group of semiconductor stocks that you can buy in the group.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yes, effectively. Right. And I recently learned over the last 48 hours, have you seen Korea's stock market index?

[Ben]

The Cosby, the Cosby Show. Yeah, sorry, yeah.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

This thing is, it's gone parabolic and it's kind of. There was a big thing about Korean traders last year, I believe when they were going. When everybody was chasing quantum stocks and like nuclear names. It was. People started to learn and figure out that a lot of it was from Korean retail traders just chasing American stocks because it was very liquid. Yeah. And I think what we're seeing right now is the same thing because someone posted that like the top five stocks and ETFs owned by Korean retail, number one is, I believe, SanDisk. Number two is the Soxx. I want to say number three is like SMH, which is another semiconductor ETF. And God damn. Is it just. It's unbelievable. It's like not every day. And just when you think, oh man, oh, I want to short some SanDisk because it's gone up 2000% in the last six months, it just keeps going up every day.

[Ben]

So how indicative of the wider world is tech Twitter? Is it, Is it a tech investment? Twitter, Is it actually like, is it a fair valuation of the market? Is it something else? Like, is it just this weird side because it seems like it's somewhat indicative, but also if you followed investment based on what Twitter said, you would lose all your money.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, I think that it is.

[Emil]

It's also weird that it's broken containment where like you were talking about how it was siloed off in all those strange places, but now it's with the new algorithm, it's like everyone is getting these things on Twitter.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah.

[Emil]

And yeah, I mean, I don't know if you should. It depends who you want to listen to. I mean, I'm sure you see we talk a lot about the like fear mongering and the guys who are just the permeable. Sorry, perma bear. And I mean, I. Even this week it's like they'll also way zoom in on the you know, S&P 500 chart and be like, I believe now is a good time to exit. And then today we're just like, absolutely ripping on a Trump tweet about a potential. Potential Iran agreement or something.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah. I think it does not.

[Ben]

Which does not exist. Like, it's just like an Axio. It's just Axios. It's just. It's just Axios saying.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yep. Yeah. The key thing here, I think, is that I'm trying to remember as a trader, is there's an old idiom or axiom, whatever you want to. Whatever the word is, the trend is your friend. And currently the trend is momentum. And everybody's got their. Everybody's got their marching orders from. From, like, institutions and hedge funds on down to retail traders, which is, while the getting's good, you better eat. Because, you know, you can stand on the sidelines and scratch your head and wonder why it's going up, or you can. It's like that. It's like that meme of the Bell chart, you know, with the.

[Ben]

No. With the really smart guy and the idiot.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yes.

[Ben]

And then the kind of middle ground, and it's like, no, the stocks are. The stocks are overvalued. No, that's exactly right.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

And I have been that middle guy way too many times to count. And I'm trying to be the guy with the wojack with the hood being like, just buy. Just buy them, you know, and you said to. It's so hard.

[Ben]

To me, it's like the best way to trade is just assume what would piss you off the most will happen.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yes, that's exactly right. Whatever move. I've told Emil this, too, in our audience is like, especially on the macro side, on just, like, the S and P. Whatever move will piss you off will piss me off the most tends to be the one that. I'm essentially calling it what other people refer to as the pain trade, meaning whatever's the most painful move for the most market participants tends to be the one that occurs and follows through. And when you've got, like the. I don't know why I'm gesturing, because nobody can see me. But when you've got, like a. I can see you. When you've got a sharp decline like we had a few weeks back, I believe now, like, six weeks ago, when you've got a sharp decline like that and then a nice tradable bottom occurs on a lot of volume, meaning there's. It's like a lot of people are coming in and there's some capitulation. Going once that bottom is in, everybody who missed shorting is now going, oh, now's my time to get short. But then when it just keeps going higher, you're pulling out your hair because now you're stuck short and it's still going higher and you're missing out on that upside. So it's a double edged sword of just like, fuck, I wanted to participate in that downside that I missed. And now that I'm getting into it, I'm missing all this upside that's been me multiple times. And then when it goes on week two of bouncing, which it did, you go, okay, surely now it's probably going to pull back again. But then when it doesn't, you're on week three. We are currently on six weeks straight up. So now I believe the move that will piss off the most people, including myself, is just sideways and up for the remainder of the summer. I think that the longer basically the higher we go. The higher we go is a very simple, simplistic way of putting it.

[Ben]

And it's very easy. It's setting everyone up for disaster though when the bottom falls out. Cause there's actually, when you look at the, when you look at the actual numbers, as I do obsessively, it doesn't look good. But then there's the smugness of, well, if it was not, if it was so bad, why number go up? And it's, everything's disconnected. Like it, I guess it kind of feels foolish to say this as if it's new, but it feels like everything is disconnected from reality at this point.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Like every, every single part of it.

[Emil]

It's very, it's a very strange feeling because so most of my money is just in index funds and stuff because I, you know, I can't get into this whole game and bogle head over here.

[Ben]

I mean I am, I am full cash, I truly am. I don't, I don't touch anything.

[Emil]

But it's, it's a very bizarre feeling because you look at it and it keeps going up and you're like, but that doesn't feel right. And like this feels like it's setting up for a massive, a massive correction or something. And every day, I mean you see things just drive. I drive by the gas station, by my house every day and I go, wow, it's up to 619, that's quite a bit of money. And you're like, surely people are going to start feeling this pain and things are going to revolve, reverberate through the economy. And then you check and you go, oh, no. People seem to like this. I guess.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I think also there was someone from the administration today who. Kevin Hassett, who was like, the consumer is strong.

[Emil]

The credit card spending is through the roof. And sure, that's because they're spending more on gas, but it's also because they just love buying right now. And it's like, dude, I do not think you have your fingers.

[Ben]

I love buying.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

But I think, I think that, that, I mean, that is certainly true. It is easier than ever to buy things and not feel necessarily like you're actually buying anything. Because I don't know about you guys, but man, it is just. It doesn't feel like I'm buying anything when I. When I have to double tap on the phone and.

[Ben]

Yep.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It's just.

[Ben]

The friction is effectively. Even if you don't have the money, you can klarna yourself silly.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yes.

[Ben]

Still don't know how those companies could possibly survive, but whatever.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah.

[Ben]

Nothing really matters.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Nothing really matters. And I think there's just so much money out there on the sidelines. There's. And I'm obviously not the only person to talk about this. It's widely known that there's just this reflexive automatic buying week after week with people's automatic 401k purchases. Yeah.

[Emil]

People like me who just. When it goes down by the dip because I'm like, great, I love a little discount. Why not?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah.

[Ben]

So in the. Yeah. In the hopes that it doesn't go. Go down further. Well, this is why I never touch the markets. It's just like I feel. I almost feel like the way the markets function now are. Is about as anti consum. Investor as it could get because it's not like regular people have access to any of the signals they'd need to actually.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Well, I guess it's.

[Ben]

Now everyone's doing insider trading. It doesn't really matter. But it feels like following one's nose or like actually understanding fundamentals doesn't really matter. Like you've got enough deals that are just completely fake with AMD and Broadcom and all that.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

That it's.

[Ben]

I'm very much focusing on tech stocks.

[Emil]

Mm.

[Ben]

The market isn't reacting to reality, if it ever did. And I'm trying to work out whether this is a remarkable era or just one of many pants shittings for the market.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah. I mean, dude, what we're all describing basically is another old phrase that bull markets climb a wall of worry. And it's like the worry is, can this be Sustained. Is this real? And surely, throughout the way up, there are companies that are going to have poor earnings or suspend dividends or have their capex suddenly skyrocket or whatever, and those companies definitely will get hit. But the way that things are going currently, with the way things are trending, everybody just kind of shifts their focus on its rotation from sector to sector. And right now, the big is AI bottlenecks. And there's this person who blew up recently on Twitter. They're an anonymous account. They're called Serenity something. But this guy. Do you know who I'm talking about?

[Ben]

No. I'm gonna look him up.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

As we're speaking Serenity, this guy started talking about this company. The ticker symbol is Axti. And I'm so pissed because I saw this tweet and I saw people talking about it, and it's like, oh, they have the market cornered on some fucking substrate. Just some shit that I have no idea. I don't understand it. And they're like, this company is so pivotal to the entire supply chain. And the market cap at the time was like $800 million. And my stupid ass was trying to apply logic to it, and I'm like, okay, if they're that crucial and they're only valued at $800 million, why doesn't some other, bigger company just come acquire them? And boom, now you own that part of the supply chain. So I. I was like, this is too good to be true. It's one of those things where, you know, it probably is just getting a pump and it'll just flounder. And it has gone 10x since then. It is now trading.

[Ben]

The company has $23 million of quarterly revenue.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, I mean, that's. That's the thing is they. But then you have companies like this Poet ticker symbol, Poet, where everybody thought that this was going to be the next one because they've got some kind of, I don't know, proprietary IP that was going to. They were starting to get contracts or something, and then just like a week ago, the stock collapsed 40%.

[Ben]

But then. I'm sorry, this actually does remind me of something very specific. Cryptocurrency. This is just crypto. It's the same fucking shit. Because I didn't invest in it, but I aggressively followed the Twitter campaigns, and it would be like, this one is going to be the infrastructure company for Web3 for this, and this one is going to speed up Web three. We need to. You need to buy this token because it's going to 10x. It's the same, except it's now the stock market.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, yeah.

[Emil]

It's funny because we haven't even really touched on that aspect of this particular market, which is that now with it being easier than ever for people to just download Robinhood or public or whichever ones. You have these insane online communities who, honestly, it doesn't get enough attention, but they're honestly sometimes even more rabid and crazy than some of these crypto evangelist guys where you have. We still get, like, hate mail, basically from the AMC type people who whenever, like. And I thought it was open.

[Ben]

And those are the people who were speculating on AMC Cinema stock.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Right, Exactly.

[Emil]

And, you know, but this has been going on for years.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Just don't understand.

[Emil]

I thought this all dissipated. And we. We made some, like, offhand comments about how crazy the AMC thing is. And for about a week, our mentions were just like, fuck you. You don't understand. AMC is the way. And so there these narratives of people who should have never got involved in these stocks, who have gotten wrapped up, have convinced themselves just, well, one day it's finally gonna hit and I'm gonna be able to. I'm gonna be able to get myself out of this hole. It's just absolutely insane.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Not only that, but a lot of these. The crypto thing is huge because as we all know now, not crypto itself is dead, but definitely the altcoin market that everybody is playing years ago.

[Ben]

It's over there.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

All of those people, you guys are

[Emil]

saying, my fart coin's not coming back.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Fart coin is fucking dead, man. Damn it. Is dead.

[Ben]

God fucking damn it. God fucking damn it. Fartcoin is pretty much my entire portfolio.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

That includes, brother. I own some, which is really pathetic. And

[Ben]

you're a guy who invests in anything. Like, you want to find the upside where you can.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, I gotta seek that alpha. But a lot of.

[Ben]

What does alpha mean?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Alpha means. Alpha means, like, your edge. Like, you're looking for any kind of edge, be it a technical thing or a fundamental thing. You find a diamond in the rough. But a lot of these crypto guys have now fully embraced trading, the AI bottleneck stuff. And now what a lot of them are doing is downloading. Not Robinhood, but Interactive Brokers is another popular retail trading platform. And they just enabled it so that you can easily trade Korean stocks. So now all these dudes, they're all looking at Korean names that don't have ticker symbols. They have numbers. So it's like 5066 or whatever the hell, and they're just these companies that, that trade at way, way lower multiples than American stocks. So all these guys are doing the same thing that they did with crypto a few years ago. They're going, oh my God, this one has the market cornered in Korea. They do this whatever manufacturing process that is absolutely crucial to blah, blah, blah. And you know, there was one soi tech or something, it went from like, you know, it's very illiquid too. And it went from like $30 a share just a month ago and now it's at 190. Like these.

[Ben]

This is just, this is lit. Oh my God. It's literally the crypto. It is, fuck it. It's the same thing.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah.

[Audiobook Narrator/Guest]

The world is transforming faster than ever and standing still isn't an option. At Oppenheimer. We're working at the forefront of the innovation economy to invest where progress begins. Finding opportunities that build and protect wealth for individuals and institutions that want a seat at the edge of tomorrow. Put the power of Oppenheimer thinking to work for you. Wealth management, capital markets, investment banking.

[Podcast Sponsor Representative]

Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures [e-mail] disclosures.

[Ben]

Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeartra Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary, Massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from Earth.

[Audiobook Narrator/Guest]

I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no. At this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that that deeply, emotionally affected me. And I left it on the mic. That's great, cuz it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too.

[Ben]

Listen to IR SA the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Advertiser/Announcer]

Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford, and I'm the founder of meaningful beauty. When Dr. Sabah and I decided to do a skincare line together, he said to me, we are going to give women meaningful beauty. And I said, that's exactly right. We want to give women meaningful beauty. Which means each and every product is meaningful. It has a reason to exist. It's efficacious. You're going to get results, and then you just go out and live your life. Meaningful beauty confidence is beautiful. Learn more@meaningful beauty.com.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, and it feels like everybody's getting rich except for me.

[Emil]

I also think it's tapping into a certain mindset of people right now that makes all this possible, where it's like, it was very apparent with the crypto thing, where it's like, no one. There are very few good jobs available anymore. It's so hard to start a business without just getting absolutely hosed. And you have all these. I mean, it's a lot of men who want a way to make money and they're like, okay, well, I'm smart. I can. I can. I can yolo my life savings into the right. The right stock. And some people do hit and then they hit. And you see that projected out into the world. And everyone's like, damn, that could be me.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

There was a guy, I just saw this article, I forgot his name, but it's a weird fucking. Some kind of weird European name. It's like, slogan Dorfenberg or something.

[Emil]

Oh, yeah.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Slogan dormant Dorfenberg. Slogan Dorfenberg. He was just a guy, just a normal guy who turned, I'm not exaggerating, $5,000 into $100 million over the course of 20, 22, 20, 23. And his high watermark was 100 million, but then he gave back like 60 of it and it dropped down to like, I don't know, 35, 40. And yeah, he just talks about how he was playing the trends and just. I mean, there's a. Guys like that have. Are blessed because they don't have the experience necessary to be cautious. So they just throw that caution to the wind and they're like, this is the thing that everybody's buying. Whereas I would go, it's already run up like 500%. He's like, hot diggity, it's up 500%, I gotta get in on that. And then it goes up another thousand percent, right? And I'm sitting there thumbing my own butthole, taking a whiff, going, man, what have I done with my life? While this guy's like, trading is easy. Fucking.

[Ben]

What you were describing is walking around a casino and being like, why am I not making money? Everyone's cheering, yeah, it's. This is so scary. How much of. Do you know how much of the stock market is made up of retail investors? Regular people now?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I don't know, but I know it's a substantial amount too much.

[Ben]

I know that.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Substantial enough that it legitimately moves markets now. And I think that's so bad. Yeah, it. Well, it used to be a lot worse because it was all focused on. It was all fragmented and it was all focused on penny stocks and people just going like, oh. You know, the one I like to talk about the most, the most famous one, arguably, was sponge tech. And sponge tech was this. It was a revolutionary new type of sponge, Ed, that had the soap built into the sponge. And it was one of the most famous ones because it, you know, it went from like $0.10 to $10 or something like that. But nowadays retail is, and I put this in quotes, smarter only in the sense that it's a lot more coordinated and organized and people can share information a lot easier and cleaner and.

[Emil]

Which almost has, like a negative impact,

[Ben]

though, because how, like, being able to share information doesn't mean the information is useful or good, right?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

And if you're the last one holding the bag, you're not going to have a good time and you're going to end up like one of these AMC guys, right?

[Emil]

And they end up starting. They end up starting subreddits and they all make themselves insane. And, you know, even when it's going. Even when it's just like, completely dead, you have three guys in there just posting A news article being like, could be good for us.

[Ben]

I'm going to be honest. I do this with. You familiar with Nebius? Yeah, Nebius. They're an AI Neo, cloud compute thing. Reading Nebius, the stockholders there and just reading like, what would it take Nebius to get to $2,000 a share? It's like 180 right now. It's like, congratulations to everyone. Like, it isn't about PT or AI bubble anymore. It's more than that. And it's just a screenshot of an all caps tweet about Larry Fink saying, I actually believe a new asset class will be buying futures of compute.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Oh, yeah, I saw that.

[Ben]

Well, that's going to be good. What do you mean a fucking commodities of fucking compute? What are you talking about?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It sounds a lot like Enron in the early 2000s when they went out.

[Ben]

It literally is. The end game of Enron was that they moved into Energies trading and the last thing they wanted to do was weather trading.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I remember.

[Ben]

Which I wish they would have.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I don't remember when it happened, but I remember. Yeah.

[Ben]

Well, I just. I've watched the smartest guys in the room three or four times now.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And no, they literally were trying to move into weather trading, which rules.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yep. You can now in their commercials were like, that's. What was their slogan? It was like, why not? I think that was. I think that was their slogan is like Enron kind of. Why not?

[Ben]

I just watched the other guys last night and there's like the massive fraudster played by Steve Koop Coogan in it. And they won't say what they do. It's like we're in everything. Yeah, but what I just feel like at this point, this market is the most griftable in the world.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Oh.

[Emil]

I mean, Trump himself. The whole thing's a casino.

[Ben]

Oh, the oil shorting.

[Emil]

Yeah. I mean, truly the leader of the country is the biggest grifter. Every Friday and Monday he's doing his little narrative truths to manipulate the market.

[Ben]

I just, I get at some point this has to go poorly. I mean, it's probably already getting poorly, going poorly with the amount of fucking money going into these random stocks. But it just feels like it's setting everyone up at once to get fucked again and again and again.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Couple things I remember the most. Frustrated. I was just piggybacking off the Nibius shareholders. There was a similar kind of fanfare all around Quantum Computing stocks last year. And I, My, my enterprising dumbass fought the trend and got short some of them a little just a couple weeks too early, right before the final blow off top. And I was getting, I was just getting sitting around. Oh man. I was getting.

[Ben]

Coming up with slurs for quantum computers.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Oh, man. Oh yeah, I was, I was getting, I was turning racist. I was getting all kinds of anger because I was just getting my ass blown out and then.

[Emil]

Which was very funny. I mean, we're looking at these companies. This company's like, it sold one computer in 2025 or something and it's just blasting off.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It booked like $6 million in revenues for the whole year and the market cap was like 25 billion. And they're like, see guys, quantum is the future. But then they eventually, they eventually petered out and have dropped considerably. But now it's funny because now all of the energy guys, the nuclear energy guys are trying to rally the energy sector and they're all tweeting like they're trying to force the meme essentially of being like, now I've seen that fail

[Ben]

in crypto so many times.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, but to answer your, the other thing, to answer your question of like, what's going to happen? How's this going to end? You know, people are going to get hurt. I think what could be the catalyst is, and this goes back to Twitter being like the hive mind. And when we talk about looking for catalysts and reasons, I think the narrative is going to start going toward Koreans again in Korea and these retail traders over there that are just going to nuts. I saw a translated Korean tweet the other day that, from someone over there who said, you guys don't understand. It's gotten so insane over here. The like old lady who's checking out.

[Ben]

I saw the grandma tweet earlier, is

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

looking at stock charts. So I think that if and when

[Ben]

we see that's exactly what happened with Enron.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, I think the same thing. I think that when and if we get a significant pullback on the Korean index on the Cosby, we will see a lot of people talking about contagion and especially in the, in the higher held names that Korean, you know, the number one retail ones like Soxil and SanDisk and all that stuff. But yeah, there's nothing quite like that pain of just going, of thinking, why the fuck didn't I just buy and chase and ride the trend? I could be sitting on hundreds of thousands, if not maybe a couple million dollars from a modest position. If I just. And they just, just when you think I can't chase it, it's at $800 a share. I can't chase it. Then it's at a thousand, then it's at 1100, then it's at 1400. I think today it hit $1500 a share. This Chandis and Micron is just. They're just going parabolic. And somewhere there's some kid in Korea just what's he doing slurping on Bibimbap. And I'm going, I'm going, is that what. Is that what it is? Bulgogi. And he's going like, hot damn. I, I can, you know, take my, take my girlfriend out or boyfriend, you know, this is.

[Emil]

We live it.

[Ben]

We live in the 21st century.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

And I'm over here just going, God damn that Korean guy out there on the other side of this trade. Because I am short a little bit of soxel and smh, but.

[Emil]

And you like Bibimbap?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I love Bibimbap.

[Emil]

I can't.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Can't we have a. Wouldn't that be beautiful if the Korean boy makes his money on the long side and then I, the his American counterparty makes money off of him.

[Emil]

So if he gets out in time and it all works out for him.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

That's exactly right. And I hope everyone gets Bibimbap. The Korean grocery vegetable lady out there. God, I hope she rings the register.

[Emil]

That's who I hope is really ringing the register.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, but it's the, it's the modern day shoeshiner, you know, it's the Korean vegetable lady.

[Ben]

It's just such a bad. It just in the past I said I bought some S&P 500 and people got mad at me. And it was like I did it once as a, as a bit for a guest that I just joked about with. I live in cash for many reasons that I won't go into. It's mostly, mostly to do with like just how I grew up. Like, stocks have always scared me. It's why I don't trust them. And it's one of the things my dad told me was like, don't bet with fear. Like, don't. Like the best thing to do is nothing if you're scared. And I actually think it's a good rule in general. It just doesn't. It feels like the Internet has made everything worse. You said it is better. I don't know if I agree. When I first got to America, 2008, I remember there were investor newsletters. There were 70 of them.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Oh yeah, that was a big one too.

[Ben]

Some crusty old man would send you his thoughts every Week and you pay him $1,500 a month for some reason, and I assume you did. Well, 2008 wasn't really a great year for stocks for some reason. And it's just like now it's just however many anonymous or pseudonymous insane people you follow, and which one of them successfully cons enough people into being insane, too?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, and they. They used to have a strategy back then where they would say you had a thousand subscribers to your newsletter. You would send one pic to a hundred people one, to another hundred people, one. And you would divvy them up. And then the people who got the losers were obviously like, well, fuck this guy. The people who got the winners were like, damn, this guy's awesome. And I'm butchering this. But basically, they would keep focusing on their winner subscribers and build their trust and build their rapport with that group. And they just kind of repeated that multiple times until they had 5,000 people who just trust them and will blindly follow them into any. I was one of those people. I remember, God damn it, man. I forgot the name of. Was some stupid name, I don't know, but I remember the name of the company, Cinecore. And the ticker symbol was sync. And I bought it in like 2010 because they had had some previous winners that went up like 2,000%. And I thought, man, I slept on that last one. I slept on the one before because I didn't trust this group. But they seem to be the hot group right now. Wouldn't you know it when I bought the one that they suggested the next one, that was when their hot streak came to a grinding halt. And I remember being. I bought this thing right before earnings with all of my money that I had in my trading account, which was like 18 grand or something. And the stock got cut in half immediately after earnings. And I was like. I was at my. I've told this story on the show where I was at my job that I hated, like, despised. I'd worked there for nine months and I saw. Oh, basically just like nine months of my. My entire job here has just been erased. I've essentially been working for free. And I went and I sat in the bathroom and I just sat there and I. I took out my phone and I took out the calculator and I. I did the math on. I included gas because I had to commute every day, and taxes. And I was like, it's going to take me, I don't know, eight months just to make back what I just lost on that one. Trade I. And there was no air conditioning in the building and it was always like 85 degrees in there every day. And I had a co worker who had a chronic like throat clearing thing. So I just go back to my desk and this guy's just going like every 10 seconds. Oh, brother.

[Ben]

I would become a serial killer.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Oh, I was, I was like, I'm the. You didn't have it back then. But I wanted to become the Joker. I mean, that's what.

[Emil]

You're joking, but that's.

[Ben]

You did have the Joker back then.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Oh yeah. Well, not like I'm meme had yet to be created.

[Emil]

Yeah, but that's what's so scary. We're joking. But there is now basically like hundreds of thousands of these people strewn across society just getting hosed on stocks losing their hard earned money or in some cases making some. In some cases there was someone becoming insane.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

There was a stock that I talked about on our show. It was called Bloom. It is called Bloom Energy. The ticker symbol is be. And Ed, I famously owned this in the teens and I sold it and it's now at like. Yeah, you see that chart? It's up to like $280 a share.

[Ben]

Well, what I also see is the receipt I have for how much Oracle is paying them.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

And oh yeah, if Oracle is a newly announced thing.

[Ben]

Oh no, I'm looking at the actual receipt from internal Oracle and let me tell you something, it's only for Stargate Abilene. So I mean, long term you'll be right. But that's the thing. None of this matters. Yeah, like things being bad now doesn't matter as long as the insane people have let it. This all sounds like Enron plus crypto. It's technically terrifying to me.

[Podcast Advertiser/Announcer]

Financial growth begins long before the first investment. It comes from understanding what you're building toward, what's at stake and what success looks like for you. At Oppenheimer, we bring bold thinking guided by the full strength of our expertise to put capital to work building and protecting wealth that lasts generations. Put the power of Oppenheimer thinking to work for you. Wealth management, capital markets, investment banking.

[Podcast Sponsor Representative]

Support for the show comes from public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On public, you can build a multi asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto and now generated assets which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index. With AI, it all starts with your project prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year. You can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one of a kind index, and lets you back test it against the S&P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com podcast and and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com podcast paid for by Public Investing Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC Advisory Services by Public Advisors, llc. SEC Registered Advisor Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures [e-mail] Disclosures

[Ben]

hey everyone, it's Kal Penn. I'm the host of Irsay The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project Hail Mary Massive sci fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone, very far from Earth.

[Audiobook Narrator/Guest]

I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections and it's like, okay, yo yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no. At this point it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that that deeply, emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great because it served the story. People will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too.

[Ben]

Listen to Irsay the Audible and I Heart Audience Book Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Podcast Advertiser/Announcer]

Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of meaningful beauty. When Dr. Sabah and I decided to do a skincare line together, he said to me, we are going to give women meaningful beauty. And I said, that's exactly right. We want to give women meaningful beauty. Which means each and every product is meaningful. It has a reason to exist. It's efficacious. You're going to get results and then you just go out and live your life. Meaningful Beauty confidence is beautiful. Learn more@meaningful beauty.com.

[Ben]

One of the reasons I don't engage with stocks is what you're talking about this sense of, like, I would go insane if I was looking at these numbers every day and they mattered. Like, if. If I was like, I'm going to lose money because something happened. Because the whimsical.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I'm not gonna make money because I sold it too soon. Right.

[Ben]

Like, all of that sounds horrible to me.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It's. Yeah, it sucks shit sometimes. But what I was gonna say. Someone actually left a comment recently. I forgot where, but they said that they bought that Bloom Energy stock when I talked about it, and they're like, I'm up 300%. Thanks, Ben.

[Ben]

Wow.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

And I'm like, cool, dude. Just enjoy yourself. Remember to pay yourself and not just let it sit there.

[Ben]

Do your listeners get mad at you if you like, do you give stock advice? I know you talk about your own trading. Good.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I talk about my own trades. But I. I have been sure to remind people that, like, none of this. I mean, people know by now, but.

[Emil]

And talk about it in, like, entertainment purposes of, like, here's how I got lost. Like, never. You should buy this or any of that.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah. I have said, like, I really like this for the following reasons kind of thing.

[Ben]

Yeah. I get people who email me and message me all the time being like, how do I short this? How do I short this? And I always say, I don't know. Yeah, Like, I just, like, I don't know. I don't give financial advice. I can't tell you how to do it. Put cash in a box under your bed.

[Emil]

I mean, that's the thing, you know, if it was that easy, everyone would be millionaires. I think as we've been talking about this entire time, the irrational. The irrationality of all of it is, like, impossible to account for. Someone like, Ben has a lot of experience with it, so he has a better shot. But, like, you know, I was telling Ben when. When all those permeables were calling for a big crash because of all of these. All of these factors, I was like, I believe them. I know that they're idiots because.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

But, like, idiots.

[Emil]

I'm. I'm looking at everything going.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah.

[Emil]

How the fuck is everything not just taking a nosedive?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah.

[Ben]

And the.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It's a lot of factors.

[Ben]

It feels like the market doesn't want it to.

[Emil]

Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. I think they're going to do anything they can to keep the ownership class satisfied and keep the market propped up for them and continuing to grow.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah.

[Ben]

Right.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It's momentum. It's just the passive investing and all that. Cash that just gets forced into the system week after week, day after day. It's a lot of different factors. It's like it just. It doesn't matter until it suddenly matters and everybody can collectively on Twitter, decide why. And then they give it a couple weeks and they've now processed it. And now it's like, well, now we've. Whew. What used to take months to process information and to process catalysts now takes weeks, if not days, if not hours sometimes.

[Ben]

So the thing I've been in, I've been enjoying right now is everyone's talking about CPUs instead of GPUs.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

You heard this?

[Ben]

Do you think this.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, CPUs are so back. They're the hottest thing right now.

[Ben]

AMD is going to make all this CPU revenue and it's like they have forgotten that like eight months ago, nine months ago, AMD promised to sell 10% of its stock to OpenAI. Never happened. Broadcom. 10 gigawatts. Never happened. Broadcom is up now because the market is slightly deciding that they kind of don't like Nvidia. It just feel. It feels like being tortured looking at this stuff and thinking about it from the perspective of the logical. It doesn't mean that I'm wrong, it just means that. Well, I mean, I'm not wrong because I'm not investing in the market, but

[Emil]

it's just like too much logic into this. That's the thing.

[Ben]

Exactly.

[Emil]

You're thinking too rationally about it. And yeah, I think it's all. All going to like, get absorbed and pivot. Like, if the, if. If the whole AI thing goes bust, I don't think we're even going to see this, like, bubble bursting that everyone's expecting. Everyone's just going to start being like, robotics. Robotics is what. That's. That's what it all is now. And we're all heavily invested in that. The future's that. And we're all just going to keep.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Robotics is going to be the next theme, I think. I.

[Ben]

You think that that's why they go after AI.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I think that there's. You can. You can, you can put your ear to the ground with robotics and maybe space with finance. Twitter. Robotics, robotics was already pretty hot earlier this year and last year, but then it kind of gave way to the memory trade and the bottleneck trade. And now you're gonna be seeing, I think, a return to the robotics trade and the physical AI thing. And of course, yeah, you've got the big IPOs coming with fucking SpaceX. And he's going to put a million people on Mars. Don't you understand? People on Mars?

[Ben]

But the thing is, here's the thing with that, with the big IPOs, the Anthropics, the OpenAI's, I don't think those two go public. I don't. I think that their S1's going to look like a dog's dinner on Thanksgiving and then it's asshole on the other way because it's. The thing is, even in an illogical market, we've yet to see a big IPO showing its dirty business. We've yet to see somebody really showing how bad things are. You'll notice the xai's ipo, they've hidden that documentation from the world.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Like they don't want fully absorbed in SpaceX.

[Ben]

Too insane. Sorry I called it Xai. It's SpaceX now. It's SpaceX now. Yeah.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

$250 billion value. It's just like you're borrowing from Peter to pay Elon, you're borrowing from Elon to pay Elon.

[Ben]

But also the other thing is, here's the thing. How is there enough money for this? Because there was like $47 billion of IPOs in 2025. They want to have 50 billion for Anthropic, 50 billion for SpaceX, 50 billion for OpenAI. How?

[Emil]

You just keep trading back and forth. You know

[Ben]

that money needs to cut stocks.

[Emil]

SpaceX buys Tesla, Cybertrucks and it's all

[Ben]

just oh, oh, oh, oh. I just mean the stock themselves anyway.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, well, probably what you'll see, ironically, I mean, a lot of, well, a couple things again, a lot of people start to talk about, oh, the anthropic or the SpaceX or the whatever IPO is gonna mark the top of the market. But then when you put that out there as a narrative, the more and more you put it out there, the more and more people think the same thing. But then when everybody's thinking that same thing, it ain't gonna fucking happen because it would. It pisses me off that it wouldn't happen. So actually it's like it's the fucking Princess Bride poison goblet scene. It's just. Well, actually a smart man would think that the market would go down, but the wise man would know that the smart man thinks that it would go down. So actually it would not. But there is a possibility that money comes out of the other momentum stocks like SanDisk, like Micron, like AMD, etc.

[Ben]

So people would dump them.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It's possible that we Might get a rotation like that. Yeah, but real fast. I saw a tweet last night from a guy who has 188,000 followers. I retweeted it. I quote, retweeted it because it was too fucking funny. He goes, it was something like, boy, I can't wait until Tesla starts sending Optimus robots into space. It's going to be so good for Tesla. And I'm like, hold on. Wait, do you even. And he hosts, like, a Tesla centric podcast. It's like, my guy, how. Who. Who is buying the Optimus robots from Tesla number one? And then why are they being blasted into space? What are they doing out there? That's the equivalent of being like, boy, Tesla's gonna make a bunch of cars and then blast them into space.

[Emil]

They're gonna go build our little Mars civilization for us.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

But who's paying for that? Oh, my God, dude, Blackstone buying the fucking robots and then going, now send them to Mars. It's going to be good for Tesla.

[Emil]

But this is. You know, we talk about this all the time, too. There's a bunch of people who have. The people who have hit on these things, then develop their own psychosis where, like, you have these Tesla people who have made a lot of money and now cannot see. Cannot see what's really happening.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Which I understand. Oh. Because if I was a guy, I am. But if I was a guy who made some of these retail guys truly have made 10, 20 million dollars.

[Emil]

Oh, I fully would be a psycho.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I'd be a psycho. I'd be like, oh, no.

[Ben]

I would be. I would. If I'd made, like, $10 million off of some insane trade I read on Twitter, I would begin to lose my grip on reality.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I wouldn't be able.

[Emil]

And I think that the CEO was omniscient, and I would follow him to the ends of the earth.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

You don't get it. This whole time, he was making outrageous claims and no one believed him. Right. But the market eventually caught up, and he's doing the same thing now. And you just don't get it, do you? I love that people are finally kind of. I mean, they've done it multiple times, but they're rightfully trying to. Starting to call out Cathie Wood in the arc.

[Ben]

Oh, you mean the. The dumbest. What's her returns like

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

now? Not good, but yeah, like, her whole

[Ben]

thing was betting in 2021, right?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, she was. She. She made one big right call, which was. They famously said, we think Tesla is undervalued when it was at like, I don't know, a hundred billion, ninety billion market cap or something like that. And that was right before it skyrocketed straight to a trillion. So they made well over 10x on their thing. And everybody was like, boy, this Cathie Wood lady's really, for a lady. She's got a. She's got a good. She's got the Midas touch. And then they were also calling for cyber cabs and autonomous stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben]

Did you hear that? That's gonna be a $34 trillion industry by 2030. Oh, yeah.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Well, I mean, of course. And even though Waymo currently has Tesla completely licked, just you wait. Because pretty soon I have a feeling that Elon Musk is gonna make millions of these cybercabs and Optimus robots are gonna be building cyber cabs and they're

[Emil]

only gonna cost $30,000.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah. And get this, Elon's gonna blast the space, which is going to be good for Tesla stock because they're going to be building all those cars, which is going to be revenue for them, and then they send them into space on SpaceX rockets, which is good revenue for SpaceX. You fucking.

[Ben]

I also think that Musk himself. This is an underrated success that Musk has had, though I don't think he did it with intention in the. The Twitter algorithm is evil. And, like, I looked for that, that Axti stock, and now I've just got four or five different psychopaths being like,

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

this is the future.

[Ben]

This is going to buy the lasers. The lasers will be the biggest stock I've ever seen. Yum.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah. Yeah. Once you. Once you click one cash tag, as they call them, you are then inundated with. With all kinds of pumping tweets. But, yeah, it's frustrating.

[Emil]

How much of that do you think is bots and how much do you think it is?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

I think that they've gotten. Oh, I'm sure they've gotten decent at the bots. It used to be when you click a cash tag of any kind, you would just get spam posts for discord rooms. But I think that they've started to clamp down on that. You know, it's frustrating because you'll see it's musical chairs. Because me as a momentum trader, again, I'm like, I don't wanna. I'm not here to judge as a momentum trader.

[Ben]

Sorry.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Just riding the trend. Like, okay, if a correct thing of me to have done, but I didn't do would have been to recognize that momentum is currently Focused on memory stocks and just buy the dips on those and get out. Buy the dips, get out. And so I try to, I try to bring that to my next trades. Okay. I'm not going to judge. I'm just going to be like, okay, what stocks have momentum? What sectors, whatever has momentum. I'm just going to try to get in and get out. But just my luck, sometimes you buy the one that just doesn't fucking work. And that's scary enough to keep me from getting on that train. It's just a fucking never ending thing that makes you just want to fucking die.

[Ben]

This is the thing, like I invest in words.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

What's that?

[Ben]

I invest in words and no one can see, but I'm doing like a dreamworks style thing, but my face isn't doing it anymore. It's just, I feel like this will only end in pain for this cycle and the next and the next and the next. Because gravity exists. Something will send this to hell. Perhaps it won't be something logical, but it's going to be something such as

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

the fact that software, I mean, it's kind of a conundrum because it was AI that brought down the software socks. But for the longest time they were untouchable and impossible to defeat, and they were free cash flow printing machines, but they've all been cut by 60, 70%. So it's entirely likely and probably inevitable that the same fate will meet a lot of these high flyers. Right now it's just a question of when.

[Emil]

Yeah, but I think Ed is talking about broadly the entire market, right?

[Ben]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the, the. Just the experience of we have a market that is somewhat dictated by Twitter psychopaths is really bad.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, yeah. It's not good. Fundamentals are totally out the window. You could make an argument for, well, hey, that's just the new normal now. And you kind of have to throw caution out the window if you want to try to make money at it. Which is. Is not a reassuring thing and it's not a good thing. It just is what it is. I'm doing the Alex Carp hands. Yeah.

[Ben]

Another great stock.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah. Oh, geez. I remember following that at five bucks and people were like, you don't understand. And I just was like, I don't know. I don't even understand what this company does. Palantir. Get the out of here. God damn.

[Ben]

I, I think the future should be mass censorship. I don't think we should have CNBC able to talk about stocks anymore. I don't think, like, just like Shut down or like, you can't talk about stocks online anymore. Now. I don't think there's any fixing this other than massive amounts of pain. And the fact they want to move to semiannual earnings is fucking bonkers. That is the craziest.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

And 247 trading.

[Ben]

247 trading plus six month earnings is. That will actually destroy the markets in ways that I'm not sure people could fully conceptualize because it would just be like, everything will be casino now. Except. No, that's an insult to my beautiful slot machines, which are fair and have real odds. Unlike these scurrilous markets run by pigs and. And vagabonds.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

And at least with the slot machines you have those fun sounds that are stimulating.

[Ben]

Exactly. I will fully admit there have been times that I've been very anxious in my life where I've just listened to casino sounds. I found them very relaxing.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It is very. I have the same thing. I remember as a kid going to Harrah's Casino in Laughlin with my family for vacation and walking through that casino floor. I was like, like, this sounds so nice and good, but I don't know why. It's just so pleasing. The ding, ding, ding. They.

[Emil]

It's got to be intentional.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

They, of course they figured it out.

[Emil]

They're pumping in oxygen. So you're feeling good.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It just feels good.

[Emil]

They figured out the perfect phonic.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Yeah, yeah. And I, I remember loving the, the bacon that I had at that Harrah's breakfast buffet.

[Ben]

Oh, the buffets. The buffets in casinos are just fucking amazing.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

It's like, hey, you might kill yourself because you just lost everything, but the least we could do is give you some really top shelf bacon. That was back then. I don't know if it's any good now, but it's still good.

[Ben]

Thank you. I've sucked. I will not hear Vegas slot here. All right, fellas, I'm going to wrap it here. Where can people find you?

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

Ben and Emil show? If you just Google the Ben and Emil show, you go on YouTube, you go on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Instagram, twitter, you know, benandmielshow.com we do our weekly show. And then we also do some fun stuff like where we famously took acid and went to the mall or we took acid and went to a train festival.

[Emil]

You'll find it all at our YouTube page. And Instagram stuff. It's all there.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

We love taking the piss out of this whole racket.

[Ben]

And I do too. Listeners, you'll have a monologue. I apologize that I missed last week. My life has been crazy, but I really appreciate you being patient with me and have another monologue. We'll have some fun guests coming up. Thank you as ever for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osawski. You can check out out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k I.com you can email [e-mail] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to Chat wheresyoured app to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media.

[Podcast Advertiser/Announcer]

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[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

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Oh no. People are going to be obsessed.

[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

What do you mean?

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[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

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[Ben]

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[Guest Trader/Finance Expert]

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