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- [00:00]
Mia Wong
This is an I Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.
- [00:04]
Jenny Garth
This is Jenny Garth from I Choose Me with Jenny Garth. History is full of mysteries like how people ever survive before modern laundry detergent. Luckily, Tide's here with boosted stain fighting for cleaner, whiter, brighter and fresher laundry versus Tide. Simply no wonder it was America's number one detergent in sales last year. If it's gotta be clean it, it's got to be Tide. Tide is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality. You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard.
- [00:47]
CarMax Announcer
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- [01:21]
Vuse Announcer
This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.
- [01:27]
Views Announcer
At Views we're vapor. Done right, always simple, always in your pocket so you can focus on what really matters. Like getting back to your podcast. Find out more@views.com that's v u s
- [01:41]
Vuse Announcer
e.com underage sale prohibited. Views is a vapor product website restricted to age 21 plus tobacco consumers. Copyright 2026 RJRBC Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile.
- [01:51]
Ryan Reynolds
I don't know if you knew this but anyone can get the same premium wireless for 15 a plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do@mintmobile.com
- [02:07]
Mint Mobile Announcer
Switch upfront payment of 45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms@mintmobile.com call
- [02:22]
Mia Wong
zone media
- [02:26]
Vicky Osterweil
welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast coming to you from what they are calling the fakest economy of all time. I am your host Mia Wong and with me to discuss really truly a stock market that is like a microcosm of all of the unhinged things that are going on in in the Economy is friend of the show, Vicky Osterweil, who has done many, many, many, many things. Writers and organizer, recent author, current author.
- [02:57]
Mia Wong
I'm just an author now. I think I have two books.
- [02:58]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [02:59]
Mia Wong
Yeah, two.
- [03:00]
Vicky Osterweil
Two books makes you an author.
- [03:01]
Mia Wong
That's right. Hi. How's it going? How's it going, man? How are you doing today this beautiful June day?
- [03:06]
Vicky Osterweil
Awful. Absolutely terrible. The whole world is on fire, both metaphorically and literally.
- [03:12]
Mia Wong
You tried to learn about the economy again, didn't you? This is what happens. You should never look huge. Don't turn over that rock.
- [03:19]
Vicky Osterweil
Huge mistake.
- [03:20]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [03:20]
Vicky Osterweil
I am learning about financial instruments that are so deranged, they make like. They make the stuff the 2008 financial collapse was based on look normal and stable. Yeah, we're doing great here. Having promised a story about the economy is fake, I want to do first what I am calling a bonus horror.
- [03:38]
Mistr Announcer
Oh.
- [03:38]
Vicky Osterweil
Because.
- [03:39]
Mia Wong
So I love a bonus.
- [03:40]
Vicky Osterweil
This boat is horror. Now, I think you are one of the people who is most uniquely qualified to address this bonus horror. As someone who has recently written a book called the Extended How Disney Killed the Movies and Took over the World that is about the evils of intellectual property. And Hassell has written about riots and also has written about the transgender. I want to hear your thoughts on. Oh, boy, oh, boy. A DMCA takedown notice filed by the Stonewall Inn LLC against a T shirt shop that was being run by the Canadian trans comics writer Sophie LaBelle for shirts that said Stonewall was a riot. So, Vicki, what do you think about the phenomenon of trademarking a riot?
- [04:29]
Mia Wong
Happy pride. First of all, I think it's really important that we celebrate June this year in all the right ways.
- [04:37]
CarMax Announcer
Yeah.
- [04:38]
Mia Wong
I mean, you know, trademarking a riot, that seems good. Like trademarking a historical event, copywriting a historical era, patenting human genome. These are all good things. Frankly, I think it's outrageous that anything should be the common property of a community, history, and humanity. So I just think it's great when people draw fences around the word Stonewall, for example, which, you know. Sure. It functions, you know, as a. You know, as a. As a stand in for an entire historical era for a crucial moment and indeed for a riot. But what about the people who own the Stonewall Inn?
- [05:18]
Febreze Announcer
Yeah.
- [05:19]
Mia Wong
Did you ever think about them and their interests? I don't think you did.
- [05:22]
Vicky Osterweil
It's like one of those, like, things where it's like, well, you couldn't have had Stonewall without the police. And it's like,
- [05:29]
Mia Wong
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's the, that's the Pontius pie. That is the good guy in the Jesus story theory, right?
- [05:36]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [05:37]
Mia Wong
You know, like, well, if it weren't for the Roman centurions, you know, who would have, who would have sacrificed Jesus? Yeah, no, it's, it's bad. I mean, I would love to have a hot take, but I feel like. Or even a lukewarm one. But that one's really just, that's just, just a happy, happy pride. Love a business gay. You know, I just love a business gay.
- [05:55]
Vicky Osterweil
The feeling I saw, seeing that. The only feeling I've had like that recently was discovering that the nc, the ncaa was like selling the biometrics data of their athletes to, to sports gambling companies so the sports gambling companies could set lines.
- [06:08]
Mia Wong
Seems right.
- [06:09]
Vicky Osterweil
Which is like, I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a thing that like scouts for professional teams have a hard time getting access to like the actual like heights and weights and stuff. It's. I don't know. This is, this is maybe the worst, maybe the worst economy. Well that they've. That we've had.
- [06:27]
Mia Wong
If you're talking about like sort of some sort of high tech surveillance apparatus that's largely used to prop up a casino. I mean, you might be talking about the ncaa, but you might also be talking about the stock market.
- [06:39]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. And oh boy. Today, today we are going on what I am, I am colloquially referring to as the Coast Be roller coaster.
- [06:46]
Mia Wong
Yay. Let's go.
- [06:49]
Vicky Osterweil
Oh boy. So Coast Be, for people who don't know, is like the main Korean stock index in the way that like, I mean, we kind of have multiple, I
- [06:56]
Mia Wong
don't know, the NASDAQ or the S&P 500.
- [06:59]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah, it's, it's like, it's like that basically it's an index.
- [07:02]
Mia Wong
It's the main major index of major Korean stocks.
- [07:05]
Febreze Announcer 2
Yeah.
- [07:06]
Vicky Osterweil
And people, longtime listeners of the show, may remember that we have talked a bit about what's called the Magnificent Seven, which are the seven American tech stocks that make up an absolutely unhinged like, percentage of these like stock listings. Right. So the reason I want to talk about coast be the South Korean one is because in a lot of ways it's like the entire economy in a microcosm because, you know, whereas the US has like seven tech stocks that are like a huge percentage of the market. Coast be over half of the fucking index is two companies.
- [07:40]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah.
- [07:41]
Vicky Osterweil
Samsung and SK Hyex, which are.
- [07:43]
Mia Wong
That's, that's that good, that's that good economy.
- [07:46]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. And yeah, that, that that's how you know your economy is good and normal when it's two fucking companies. Both of which is like valuations have been spiking massively specifically because of chip production and specifically because of chip production for, I guess I have to say the words AI instead of just doing a long and elaborate bit where I simply just call it matrix multiplication over and over again.
- [08:07]
Mia Wong
Yeah. Graphics cards, they're doing it. It's because graphics cards are so valuable. That's what, that's what this is all about.
- [08:13]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. This is now like half of the main index of like one of the most advanced industrial economies in like, in human history. Right. Is fucking making graphics cards for chatbots.
- [08:26]
Mia Wong
South Korea is what, the, the, the 13th, the 12th or 13th largest in the entire world, these two companies, right?
- [08:32]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah, yeah, it's good. And you know, there was a while back, executive disorder where I was like spending a decent amount of time tracking Kospi going up and down because it has lost 10% of its value multiple times this year. That's unhinged. That does not happen. Right. Like outside of like the Great Recession. Right. It's like that kind of shit. That's a really rare thing to happen.
- [08:58]
Mia Wong
This, this used to happen in the 19th century all the time, right. So, like, what we're, what we're looking at in Korea and indeed in the US is like stock markets that like what used to be before the Great Depression, before Black Friday and the invention of the sec to make sure that this wouldn't happen every day. And I think, like, one of the things that, I mean, maybe we're going to get to this. I don't want to jump on top of your thing, but I think the thing that is really wild about what's going on with the Cosby is also, I think again, to connect it to sort of the gambling thing is that in the last month, two months, I don't remember exactly when this happened, Korean stocks got added to like Robinhood. Right. It got added to like US Retail trading. Now, like retail trading, like, used to technically be possible before these like, apps and before Reddit, you know, our, our Wall street bets or whatever. But it was hard. You had to have a, you had to have an agent, you had to like, do a thing. And then day trading in the 90s made it a little easier for like middle class people to do. But now like, you can do it instantly, anywhere. And you know, if you remember, I mean, I know you remember Mia, but if the folks at home remember, like the game, stock stuff like that weird cult during the NFT era. You know, the Meme stock. The meme. It was called Meme Stocks. And how, like, sort of, you know, this one Reddit subreddit could, like, make a stock, you know, quadruple its price overnight or go 10 times overnight.
- [10:14]
Mistr Announcer
Right.
- [10:15]
Mia Wong
The thing is, what's happening is that the Korean retail market has also exploded. So not only are you getting US Investors, Right. Like day traders, just, like, going on really weird tips and, like, pouring millions and millions of US Dollars.
- [10:30]
Febreze Announcer
Right.
- [10:30]
Mia Wong
Because, like, yeah, you know, if it used to be hard to trade on the US Stock Exchange, trading in a foreign stock was basically impossible.
- [10:37]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [10:37]
Mia Wong
You just couldn't do it again. You technically could, but you had to have a lot of money and a lot of connections.
- [10:42]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. You had to actually be someone who worked in finance.
- [10:45]
Mia Wong
Yes.
- [10:45]
Vicky Osterweil
Like, you know, like, you had to be effectively a professional.
- [10:48]
Mia Wong
Exactly.
- [10:49]
Vicky Osterweil
Or it's like, you know, to, like, return to the gambling analogy, which is increasingly less and less of an analogy. It's like the equivalence of, like, it. It was technically possible to be one of those guys who, like, played online poker. Right, Right. It was the equivalent of that, where it's like, okay, you can dedicate your entire life to this one incredibly niche thing.
- [11:09]
Mia Wong
Exactly. But so the. The opening up and the deregulation of this trade has. This is sort of maybe, can be a little hard to grasp. But, like, so the Korean economy is massive, but compared to the US Economy, it's nothing. Right. So when all of the money from. When I went a ton of retail money from the US in coordinated fashion, you know, coordinate online on Reddit or whatever. In Discord, servers can flood into the Korean markets. It can make a huge change. Imagine an even smaller. Imagine a smaller market. Right. Like, imagine something that's not worth very much, and you get the other exchange rate in there, and you're not getting hit on exchange rate fees. You can really swing the market. Foreigners could swing the market really easily.
- [11:49]
Views Announcer
Right.
- [11:49]
Mia Wong
By speculating, which, again, used to be a thing that finance operatives did, but it was really risky and it was, like, a really dodgy thing to do.
- [11:56]
CarMax Announcer
Yeah.
- [11:56]
Mia Wong
But these retail investors don't really care because it's gambling. It's just a gambling app.
- [12:01]
Febreze Announcer
Right.
- [12:01]
Mia Wong
They're gambling on stocks.
- [12:02]
Vicky Osterweil
Yep.
- [12:03]
Mia Wong
But now there's. It has become a huge thing in Korea as well. There was just a documentary, I think it was released like, yesterday on, like, Bloomberg, about how intense retail buying. So everyone in Korea has, like, sort of stock mania. Right. Like in the documentary, there's like, you know, like a woman at a grocery checkout, like, she's working and she's like, checking her stock prices as she's like, scanning stuff, you know? And like, it's not about lower class people shouldn't have access. It's about this means that all the money is being funneled. The reason Korea is important, as most of you probably know, is because it's where all of the chips are made. It is where processors have to be made. It's the only place on earth where they can really. They're in Taiwan where they can be made.
- [12:44]
Vicky Osterweil
And.
- [12:45]
Mia Wong
And because of the huge AI boom, right? The huge amount of money circulating between three different companies, right? Back and forth forever, that every piece AI supply chain, right? So like the. The, you know, each mineral that goes into it, the people who make a particular, like, plastic clip that's really hard to make that, like, fits into the data center. Like, all of these companies get identified by, you know, deranged gamblers, you know, and they say, like, this company. And in the Korean stock market, so in the US Stock market, there's like tickers, you know, like three letters. In the Korean stock market, it's just like a number, right? So in the CO speak, so they're like, guys, 4201 is this company, I'm telling you, it makes, you know, the. It makes the sort of fiber cables that go in a data center, right? And if that takes off on finance, Twitter or in, you know, Wall street bets or whatever, they can just swing these companies. And of course, so. So you've got these US and European investors throwing all their money in. So then Korean people are like, we got to get in on this because it's all booming. And all of these are just. Are just really random companies that make really obscure. They're basically what would have been penny stocks back in the day.
- [13:52]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [13:52]
Mia Wong
Right. And they're getting treated at wild volumes. And it's. It's good. It's good because it's real money that really reflects the value of the Korean economy. And it's not just a bunch of people losing their shirts in a series of complex scams.
- [14:10]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. There's obviously this sort of like, groundswell mania of this sort of like, it's just a gambling boom. Right. But on the institutional level, they are also doing things that are. I was saying this to Vicky before, before I started this, like, these might be the most deranged financial instruments I have ever seen. And, like, I have spent a significant amount of my Life studying the 2008 financial collapse. And these make those instruments look normal.
- [14:40]
Mia Wong
Yeah, you described one to me and I literally was stunned in silence because I didn't believe that the thing you had just described was real.
- [14:46]
Vicky Osterweil
It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. When we come back from these ads,
- [14:56]
Febreze Announcer 2
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- [15:59]
Febreze Announcer 2
You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact awards podcast, available June 1 on the iHeartRadio app. And everywhere podcasts are heard.
- [16:06]
Vuse Announcer
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- [16:14]
Views Announcer
At Vuse, we're vapor. Done right, always simple, always in your pocket so you can focus on what really matters. Like getting back to your podcast. Find out more@views.com that's v u-s e.com
- [16:30]
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- [16:37]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [18:06]
Vicky Osterweil
Okay, we are back. I have been promising you the worst financial idea I have ever seen, right? So like what we've been talking about thus far has been, you know, like the entire economy now is someone who thinks they got, they got a tip on the horses and is putting their life savings in on like fucking. I don't know. What, what's a horse name? Like secretary? I don't know.
- [18:31]
Mia Wong
Yeah, sweet Mondays, that one in the third.
- [18:33]
Vicky Osterweil
I don't know.
- [18:35]
Mia Wong
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [18:37]
Vicky Osterweil
So but like here's the thing, right? That is comparatively not that risky in the sense that when you put the money on the horses, right, there's kind of a limit to how much you can lose.
- [18:52]
Mia Wong
Yeah, totally.
- [18:54]
Vicky Osterweil
You're putting the money in. You can only lose that much money. Now if the stuff that the regular people doing are again like putting it all on red or just like fucking. I got a tip on the horses. What the institutional people are doing, I can only describe this shit as like. And some of this is also designed to be bought by retail investors, which is just unbelievably insane. Like I can only describe this as the equivalent of. It's the market equivalent of Russian roulette. Okay? So on June 22, Cospeed did a thing that it does semi normally, which was again lose 10% and trigger the circuit breakers. They trigger the circuit breakers. Like again like today we were recording this on June 26, a thing that again is not supposed to happen in normal markets. Like that's panic shit. But on Monday it triggered because Korea's like national like financial watchdog. Like the guy who ran it was like, okay, maybe, maybe it was a mistake for regulators to have approved this thing called leveraged ETF on, on a single stock. Okay, so, so to understand how bonkers this is like that, that, that's all gibberish, right? And for once, this isn't even a case where the financial people are packaging something simple with a gibberish name. This is ridiculous. So ETFs are exchange traded funds. And it's supposed to be a mechanism where like, okay, there's just one thing you can buy, but that one, like security. This is like the physical thing you're buying has like a bunch of stocks in it, right?
- [20:27]
Mia Wong
So you could say like, I want to buy all the peanut farmers in America, right? Okay, there's five publicly listed peanut companies. They make an etf. It's the peanut etf. You buy it, no problem, you know, and then you just buy that and you ride the whole. All five of them together instead of just one.
- [20:40]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah, the place you might have heard of this is there were a bunch of like, supposedly like green ETFs that were supposed to be like, these are the things you can invest in to save the environment. And obviously a lot of that was scams. But also it's one of those things that was bad while it was happening. And I. And you, you miss it when it's gone because it was replaced by what I can only describe as what if we did an ETF on destroying the economy. But again, so the purpose of these things, right, is that they're supposed to allow you to have one instrument to hold positions on multiple companies.
- [21:13]
Mistr Announcer
Right?
- [21:13]
Mia Wong
It's a basket of companies.
- [21:14]
Vicky Osterweil
Yes. Now, now in the last about seven years, right? This is a relatively recent phenomenon. I'm sure people maybe had like done something like this before that, but this is a relatively recent phenomena. Somebody had the absolutely horrible idea of what if you had an ETF that was just one stock?
- [21:35]
Mia Wong
Well, but Mia, that doesn't make any sense. They're all the same thing.
- [21:38]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah, right. And I looked at this, I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? That, like, what, what, what, what the fuck is it? What the fuck is a single stock etf? Like that's, that's like, that's literally, it's nonsensical, right?
- [21:48]
Mia Wong
Just buy the stock.
- [21:49]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah, right. You buy the stock or you buy a future, like on the stock, right? If you're betting the stocks and go up and down, you buy like futures, right? This the only way. I don't know. I think Vicki kind of came up with the best way to describe this that I've heard Which is like. It's. It's like getting a parlay on.
- [22:06]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [22:06]
Vicky Osterweil
So one of the very formative moments of Mia childhood, right, Was reading this book by Cory Doctorow, friend of the show Called for the Win, which is about a bunch of gold miners in a video game unionizing. There's like a plot, right? But then in between the plot, there will just be a chapter that is Cory Doctorow explaining to you how the 2008 financial collapse happens. And one of the things that he knows that has stuck with me my entire life and I think is genuinely a really important lesson, is that if someone comes up to you and the thing that they say is, hey, you can buy this thing, right? You know, or you can. You can place a bet. You can buy a financial instrument. And the way that it works is if multiple things happen, you know, like. Like several things that are different happen. Right? So, for example, it's like if LeBron scores 32 and WEMBY has three blocks
- [23:02]
Mia Wong
and I beat the point spread by five, right?
- [23:04]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah, right. Then you get paid out $100 million, whatever. Right? That's. And that's sort of extreme. Example.
- [23:09]
Mia Wong
But that's a parlay. That's a sports parlay.
- [23:10]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah, that's a sports parlay. Every single time someone is doing that, it is a scam. 100%, it is a scam. If you put your money into this, you are lighting it the fuck on fire.
- [23:21]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [23:22]
Vicky Osterweil
Now, this is effectively what's going on with these leveraged ETFs, right? They're taking, like, a shit ton of positions at the same time. It's a thing that allows you to, like, have a bunch of different positions at one time on the same stock. This is an asset so dangerous that, like, if you look up any definition of these things, literally all. All of the sites will tell you, do not hold this thing for longer than one day.
- [23:49]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [23:50]
Vicky Osterweil
Because if you hold this asset for longer than one day, you will lose all of your money. Like Investopedia, for example, like, it just explains this, right? Where they're like, hey, this fucking asset. You can be betting on a stock to go up, right? Because of the way it happened, you can lose money.
- [24:06]
Mia Wong
Yep.
- [24:07]
Vicky Osterweil
On the stock you are betting to go up. Going up. Because it's this, like, fucking unhinged set of parlays.
- [24:12]
Mia Wong
It's all these conditionals on it. So, like, it has to go up within this certain time window or it has to bounce, right. It has to go down then up or something like that, Right. So a bunch of weird conditions.
- [24:21]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. And you can lose more money on this than you put in.
- [24:24]
Mia Wong
How does that.
- [24:25]
Vicky Osterweil
Which is insane, because you have to pay out all of the options that you take in.
- [24:29]
Mia Wong
Right, of course.
- [24:30]
Vicky Osterweil
So you can lose more money than you put in.
- [24:33]
CarMax Announcer
This is.
- [24:34]
Vicky Osterweil
They found a form of gambling that is actually worse than putting all of your life savings on red. Because at least if you put all your life savings on red, you can only lose all of your life savings.
- [24:44]
Jenny Garth
You.
- [24:45]
Vicky Osterweil
You could lose your family's life savings on this shit. Like, they could.
- [24:49]
Mia Wong
Like, famously, it's always good to go into debt to your booking. This is famously. It's famously good to get credit from your. From your sports gambler. That's a. That's a famous. A famous narrative thing. That's good to do.
- [25:00]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. And again, to get a sense of how unhinged this market is right now, the regulator saying, we probably shouldn't have approved people making these for a bunch of the biggest Korean tech stocks caused the market to tank by 10%.
- [25:14]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah.
- [25:14]
Mia Wong
Just saying, like, exactly. There's a lot of different angles on this that we could go into. Sorry. So is it okay if I switch to, like, some US Stuff as an example for a second? Amazing. So folks were pretty. It became pretty clear that Trump was playing the price of oil, right? Mondays, he would be like, we're retaliating against Iran. Fridays, you'd be like, peace is here. Right. There's just a really open trade that he was just making. And it worked because it worked, right. As a classic. Like, like, well, the investors do it, so it works. The price goes up and down. You can play it. That was how war policy has been dictated for most of 2026, which is great and awesome and really good, but. So the thing about the AI stuff is that, like, financial people insist that AI is relatively safe because there's actual capital spending. Right. Money is being spent, they say, on data centers. And, you know, Ed Zitron, who I know is part of the network, has done a lot of reporting on the money's not actually being spent. It doesn't actually. But. Yeah, so. Yes, exactly. So it's all bullshit. These are these bullshit companies. AI, but, like, one of the things that we're starting to see happen and that Trump really innovated, but that everyone's favorite Nazi, the trillionaire, Elon Musk, although he's not a trillionaire anymore, unless he moved out of his space expositions, I
- [26:29]
Vicky Osterweil
think he managed to do a pump and dump with his own company.
- [26:34]
Mia Wong
Elon Musk did A crypto rug pull at the scale of the world economy. Okay. Which like, you know, in a way, like, you know, I'm not gonna hand it to. You don't have to hand it to him. But it's truly one of the craziest scams that, like in, in plain sight that's ever happened. And part of the way this worked. I want to talk about this because it's not just about him being a creepy scammer. It's about the way that this is all being supported by the finance industry. Like, which is what you're talking about with these instruments.
- [27:01]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [27:02]
Mia Wong
So you've got these, like, really nasty instruments that they're developing to rinse Korean grocers of their, you know, their. Of their money, whatever. But you've also got like, what, what happened with the SpaceX IPO is that when something gets listed on the NASDAQ and the S and P, when it gets added to these indexes, everyone holding an index fund has to buy those stocks. So it means that like really safe stuff, like, you know, a 401k and you're just like, I just put the 401k in the S&P 500. Right. It's just the stock market. I'm buying the whole stock market.
- [27:35]
Vicky Osterweil
Yep.
- [27:36]
Mia Wong
Line goes up, no problem. So when the SpaceX IPO happened, I listed at 160, something like that. 160, was it 169.69?
- [27:45]
Vicky Osterweil
I don't remember the exact number.
- [27:46]
Mia Wong
I think there was. It did have a meme price. I don't even remember whatever when it listed. That was 10 days ago. 15 days ago that the IPO happened.
- [27:54]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah, something like that.
- [27:54]
Mia Wong
When that, when that went public, all of the institutional funds had to buy a proportional amount of SpaceX. Right. So they had to buy it because that's just how it works. And that's, that's reasonable. That is actually like regulated. It's a reasonable thing. So what happened was this. The price retailers drove it way up. Right. Elon still has, you know, with it, using Twitter, managed to get a bunch of retail investors. This is going to go straight to the moon. Whatever, whatever. So for five days it goes up to like 1 9200. I think it crosses 200 at one point. Right. And now it is down to 150. So it is 10% down from where it was 10 days ago. Why is it 10% down? Because SpaceX is a valueless company compared to what they're valuing at.
- [28:34]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [28:35]
Mia Wong
SpaceX is 15 government contracts in a trench coat. Yeah, like, it's just not, it's not a company that like has any path to profitability. It also doesn't have a path to Mars. But what that means is that institutional investors created and regulators created a situation where Elon and his buddies pump and dumped. As you said, they got the price way up, they moved out of their position and now those Funds lost their 10% invest stake in SpaceX and there's no reason to anticipate that stock going back up.
- [29:04]
Vicky Osterweil
Yep.
- [29:04]
Mia Wong
It's just like, there's just no reason for it. It's overvalued as it is. Right, so this is how like people who aren't doing retail investing, people who are not, you know, people who are like, I don't trust the stock market.
- [29:15]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. So this is, this is the California pension fund.
- [29:18]
Mia Wong
Exactly, exactly.
- [29:19]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [29:20]
Mia Wong
So, yeah. And like, obviously like Trump did that with the Trump coin. Like we're like, basically like, what the lesson learned from the crypto and the NFT explosion. And by the way, bitcoin is down almost 100% on the year. It's been under 60,000 for months. Bitcoin is collapsing as a safe, the safe haven asset. If you were heavily invested in bitcoin, you're ruined right now if you held for a year. Anyway, they learned from cryptos and NFTs is, oh, we can just do that in the stock market too, right? We can just do it. We can just play the entire stock market like this and we can blame it on. I started by talking about the retail investors and that's really wheel that is driving the volatility and that's if you're a professional or you're in an industry force, you can just skim the cash off. Now the reason that they need to skim the cash as fast as possible right now is because two years ago I think I came on here to talk about the commercial. Did we talk about commercial real estate? Like the commercial real estate bubble on the show?
- [30:15]
Vicky Osterweil
Oh, I don't remember.
- [30:16]
Mia Wong
Whatever. I don't remember if we actually talked about on the show or just, just, you know, we just texted about it, whatever, cackled about it privately. So basically the private banking sector, or sorry, the shadow banking, which is now called private capital, private financing, like that sector was facing a collapse two years ago in 2023 as all of their office buildings came to do. Basically there was this massive expansion commercial real estate. And the pandemic combined with a cooling economy, like they was in trouble. All of that money has now gone into the AI boom. So they staved off this collapse that was supposed to happen in 2023, 2024. There was even a word for it which was like the maturity wall. Right. Like all these things were going to hit this maturity wall. Like everyone was ready for it. So now those companies are starting to go down. Right.
- [31:02]
Mistr Announcer
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- [31:02]
Mia Wong
The private equity. And the thing about private equity is that it's. What if a bank had no regulation?
- [31:07]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [31:08]
Mia Wong
So private equity has burned all of their money into the AI boom. But it's not just them. If we look at like the huge layoffs in video game companies are going on right now. Right.
- [31:16]
Vicky Osterweil
Yep.
- [31:17]
Mia Wong
Like all tech investors are taking all of their money out of everything and putting it in AI.
- [31:22]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [31:22]
Mia Wong
Right. They're going all in on AI. That's why there so insistent on doing it. Movies can't get made. Like I talked to, you know, for my book that I wrote, I've talked to a bunch of movie producers. I have relationships with them. They just can't get funding. These are people with huge movies. Right. Big small producers. There's nothing is getting green lit. There is just no capital for anything except AI. The entire economy has put all of its resources.
- [31:48]
Vicky Osterweil
Yep.
- [31:49]
Mia Wong
Into LLMs.
- [31:51]
Vicky Osterweil
Yep.
- [31:52]
Mia Wong
Nothing else is getting made. The data centers aren't being built. And then they developed elaborate ways to ruin Korea by gambling on it.
- [32:01]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah.
- [32:02]
Mia Wong
Incredible economy.
- [32:03]
Vicky Osterweil
It's astounding. It's like.
- [32:04]
Mia Wong
It's like the entire.
- [32:05]
Vicky Osterweil
It's like every rich person on earth has collectively taken all of humanity's chips and put it on tulip bulbs.
- [32:13]
Mistr Announcer
Yeah.
- [32:14]
Mia Wong
You know, I compared this to the 19th century because this is before the SEC. What used to happen. Joint stock companies. Used to. Guys just used to go around a town. Right. You know, during the era of the telegram. This is. The railroads were the most famous example of this for the 1860s and the 1870s. Post Civil War, there were like five or six railroad stock crashes. People would just sell you listen, we're going to make this rail line. It's going to be awesome. Okay. Rails are the future. It's so high tech. You know, get. Get it on the ground floor. And then there would be massive economic collapses. And you know, that wild insecurity was driven by a lot of what we would call now retail investment. Right. A lot of what the 20th century did. What the SEC did was try to make sure that didn't happen. Because when everyone puts all of their money into a sort of speculative asset like say AI data centers. Because shrimp. Jesus. When everyone was like, wait a second. These aren't very valuable. The money just is gone.
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- [36:29]
Vicky Osterweil
Part of the reason why everything feels so weird is that like in order for the entire economic system to function, there's two giant collective delusions that everyone has to maintain at the same time or everything collapses. One is that the, is that the AI boom is inevitable and it's going to make money.
- [36:45]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [36:46]
Vicky Osterweil
And the second one, and this is also directly tied to South Korea, is that the war in Iran is going to end and it's going to end soon.
- [36:52]
Mistr Announcer
Yep.
- [36:52]
Vicky Osterweil
Because if both of these things are not true, and they're not true.
- [36:57]
Mia Wong
Neither is true.
- [36:57]
Vicky Osterweil
They're not true. Like, there's no fucking no. They're both complete lies. But everything falls apart immediately. And South Korea, you know the other reason why South Korea was having these like, just 10, like 10% of the market gets annihilated in a few minutes, is that this would happen every time it became clear that, no, the war isn't ending. Like every time Trump's fake, like, peace deal fell, like latest fake peace deal fell apart, the market would collapse. But the problem is, in order for all these people to keep making money, everyone has to continue to collectively believe that, no, it's going to end.
- [37:30]
Vuse Announcer
Yeah.
- [37:31]
Vicky Osterweil
And so you're just in this perpetual cycle, right, where like South Korea is one of the countries in the world that is the most exposed to the effects of this war. That's not like actively being bombed. Like, this is like, like in terms of massive industrial economies. Right. Like, obviously, like East Asia. Yeah. Like, like the rest of like east and South Asia particularly is getting by all of this, as we talked about elsewhere on this show, but South Korea is the core industrial center.
- [37:55]
Mia Wong
Yeah.
- [37:55]
Vicky Osterweil
That's the most fucked by this specifically because they, because they rely so much on natural gas and just regular, like regular fossil fuels that come through, that come through the Strait of Hormuz, which is not open, has never been opened, will not be reopened.
- [38:09]
Mia Wong
Yeah. I heard there was a great Deal. I heard that actually it's going to be open. Don't worry. It's going to be fine. Listen, Netanyahu is a reasonable man. You know, Trump is a reason. These are reasonable people. It's going to go fine. It's all going to reopen soon.
- [38:22]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. Ben GVIR only, only holds a minor post in the Israeli government. Hold on, I am Googling this live.
- [38:30]
Mia Wong
God damn it. God damn it.
- [38:32]
Vicky Osterweil
Oh, wow. Checks, notes. He is the Minister of National Security. Oh, no.
- [38:37]
Mia Wong
Oh, no. So of course, you know, we talk about the economy and obviously the horror in Lebanon and Palestine is the real like is the most horrible and Iran is the most horrible thing going on right now. But these cascading effects are also horrible. If we've learned one thing from the last 10 years, it's that it can always get worse for everyone.
- [38:59]
Vicky Osterweil
Oh, yeah.
- [38:59]
Mia Wong
So we have this moment where everyone is gambling on South Korean chip manufacturers, right? And sub manufacturers, on the basis that they will be totally necessary to the production of chips that are being sold to companies that can't use them, that are a depreciating asset, that get become valueless. These extremely expensive chips lose all their value within five years. They are going to install those chips into buildings that don't exist yet that are, and they're going to put billions of dollars worth of these chips again. The chips have been made. The chips do exist, largely, although there's still a lot of speculation. The chips exist, they're sitting in a warehouse. At some point someone is going to put them into a warehouse. That itself is being speculated on by the same companies who are buying Future Compute on it as a different financial instrument. And they're going to build it. And then when they do build it, there's going to be so much demand for AI because people love to use it and it's really made the economy so efficient. It is like truly.
- [40:07]
Vicky Osterweil
And also, and also one final point about this, right? And also that the people who use it and who become power users of it aren't going to request more tokens than actually make them money because more people using it is actually bad for them because if those people use tokens, they're selling the tokens below cost.
- [40:25]
Mia Wong
Right? Yeah, it's good. So basically this is a really strong thing for the economy and it's obviously, it's obscene and it's funny and it's, it's truly terrifying. But I think the thing that, that I think I really want to like, underline. I mean, I know, you know, you know, you would say the same is that this is our money. Yeah. This is money that we produced by working our whole lives. We have worked so hard for so long and we produced so much surplus value. And we, you know, that's, that's the nature of the situation. And that money is being lit on fire, sometimes quite literally. Right. Like in coal fire plants and gas plants. It is destroying the planet. It is doing so in the name of keeping this bubble alive long enough for all of the big people who are being rinsed, who got rinsed by investing in office buildings to get out with their cash and leave with the bag so that as we face the total political and economic collapse as well as ecological disaster, there are people with enough money that they stole. This is one, it's, it's like one last job at the level of like global delusion. Yeah. And it's all built on this, like, myth making about AI but it's also built on all of these structures and it's also built on like the collapse of the global economic system through war and stuff. In short, it's good. But this is our money. This is our money. We made this money. They're lighting it on fire so that they can get an, a bad investment they made 10 years ago back all the bad investments they've made since 2009. They're trying to cash out on that as fast as possible right now. And as long as they can keep pumping the stock market, they can keep taking that money out and they have a chance to make it. And some of them will be ruined. But this isn't going to be like the 30s. I don't think we're going to see a lot of them jumping out of skyscrapers tragically, because I think, I think honestly most of them are going to get out and we are going to be the ones holding the bag and we are the ones who produce that money that they're lighting on fire. And this is what they want to do with us and with the world and the world that we live in. And I'm so glad that we have no way to stop them. I think that's good. Personally.
- [42:40]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. You know the optimistic view on this. And again, I've been saying this already. Trump's approval rating is 30% and the bomb hasn't even gone off yet. Like the economy hasn't blown up.
- [42:50]
Mia Wong
And low key, the demand destruction for natural gas and oil is so intense that the economy, the global energy market is greening faster. It's greening finally for the first time since we started Doing this is greening at a pace fast enough to potentially stop some of the worst effects of climate change.
- [43:11]
Vicky Osterweil
So unfortunately, the problem is, at the same time, we're also. All of Our new economic growth is entirely like fucking gas turbines.
- [43:21]
Mia Wong
They're never going to run. It's like, it's, you know, it's fine. Those are never going to run.
- [43:25]
Vicky Osterweil
Well, no, they've. They have definitely poisoned a shit ton of people.
- [43:29]
Mia Wong
Oh, yes, absolutely. No, no, no doubt, no doubt.
- [43:33]
Vicky Osterweil
Yeah. But I also think that, like, you know, like, to some extent, like, part of the strategy here, right? If you look at sort of like what venture capital is doing, this, their plan is like, okay, yeah, we can navigate the complete destruction of the global economy and the subsequent political calamities and the subsequent political fallout and the collapse of, like, nation states by, you know, create. Creating our own sort of fascist corporate autocracies.
- [43:57]
Mia Wong
Totally.
- [43:58]
Vicky Osterweil
But they don't have to be right about that. Like, they just don't.
- [44:02]
Mia Wong
They're not right. Have you seen how bad these guys are? Elon Musk can't even make a friend. You think this guy can run a corporate state? City, state. Like, come on. When that money stops having its value, they're not ready for the world which they're reaping. I said there's nothing we can do about that. There's nothing that we can do about it with the levers of power that exist right now formally, but there's actually a lot we can do about it. And they're going to learn a lot of reasons why previous capitalists built the sec, built the welfare state, why they did things, and that's going to be one of the last things they learn. Inshallah. Yeah.
- [44:36]
Vicky Osterweil
Last time they did something like this, that was frankly less stupid because I cannot believe I'm saying this. At least there were houses. I can't believe I'm saying this right, but, like, the last time they did this, they set off a wave of world revolutions. They barely survived and, like, revived the international left in a way that had been basically moribund for extremely long periods of time outside of, like, very small regions. And now this, you know, this sort of like the sort of sleeping giant that they unleashed has been awake for like a decade and a half. And they're like, what if we did this shit again? Yeah, but worse.
- [45:22]
Mia Wong
I mean, I don't see what could go wrong for them. I think I'm gonna say it again. Happy pride. Let's make this one the last birthday America ever has. 250 is more than enough, don't you think?
- [45:35]
Vicky Osterweil
They had their time. Our time is coming soon.
- [45:39]
Mia Wong
It Could Happen Here.
- [45:45]
Vicky Osterweil
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in Episode Descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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Ryan Reynolds
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