Better Offline - The Insanity of the Markets with Ben & Emil

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

On this week’s Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by the hosts of the Ben & Emil show to talk about how the markets have been driven insane by semiconductor buzz and social media hysteria.https://benandemilshow.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@benandemilshow Please support me by subscribing to my premium newsletter - here’s $10 off your first year of annual https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/84rt762qen YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Mima we're at Zitron and this is 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 are live. That's right. We've got Ben and Amiel from the Ben and Amiel show. Fellas, thank you for joining me. Wow, thank you so much. Thank you for having us. And you can't see it.

We're both wearing matching great shirts. today. It's beautiful. Yeah. They've, and you can't see this because 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. We spend $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.

Whoa. Geez, Louise, these Koreans. 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.

Yeah. And it's usually an Axios article. about oil. Yeah, oil these days, it doesn't matter anymore. I mean, 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 uh 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 in a 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 caring.

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&P, but now it just doesn't matter anymore. Because now the narrative is shifted. Everybody's focused on memory stocks and semiconductors. The socks, the semiconductor ETF has just been on a parabolic run. And that's just a group of different, for the audience. That's just a group of semiconductor stocks that you can buy in the group.

Yes. Effectively. Right. And I recently learned over the last 48 hours, have you seen Korea's stock market index? The Cosby? The Cosby show? Yeah. Sorry.

Yeah. This thing is 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 sand disk.

Number two is the socks. 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, I want to short some sand disk because it's gone up 2,000% in the last six months.

It just keeps going up every day. So how is it to? of the wider world is tech Twitter. 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. Yeah. I think that it is... 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.

Yeah. 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 perma bowl. Prima bear. Sorry, perma bear. And I mean, 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 Iran agreement or something. Yeah, I think it does not, which does not exist. Like it's just axiote. It's just axiose. It's just axiose saying, yep. Yeah, the key thing here I think is that I'm trying to remember as a traitor is there's

an old idiom or axiom, whatever you want, whatever the word is. The trend is your friend. And currently, the trend is momentum. And everybody's got their marching orders 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, um, no. Oh, what with the really smart guy and the idiot. Yes. And then the kind of middle ground.

And it's like, no, the stocks are, the stocks are overvalued. No. That's exactly right. 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 them. You know? And it's so hard. You said to me, it's like the best way to trade is just assume what would piss you off the most will happen.

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&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's what other people referred to as the pain trade, meaning whatever is 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 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 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. It feels like it's setting everyone up for disaster though when the bottom falls out. Because there's actually, when you look at the actual numbers, as I do obsessively, it doesn't look good. But then there's the smugner-serve well, if it was so bad, why a number go up? And it's, everything's discon-like, 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. like every

single part of it? It's a very strange feeling because so most of my money is just in index funds and stuff because I can't get into this whole game. Bogelhead over here. I mean, I am fully in cash. I truly am. I don't touch anything.

But 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 reverberate through the economy. And then you check and you go, oh, no, people seem to like this, I guess. Yeah. So there was someone from the administration today who. Kevin Hassett, who was like. The consumer is strong.

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 shit right now. And it's like, dude, I do not think you have your finger on the post. I love buying shit. But 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 have to double tap on the phone and it's just like oh yeah the friction is effectively even if you don't have the money you can clana yourself silly

yes still don't know how those companies could possibly survive but whatever it doesn't matter yeah nothing really matters 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. People like me who just, when it goes down by the dip, because I'm like, great, I love a little discount. Why not? Yeah.

So in the, yeah. And 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-consumer and investors it could get. Because it's not like regular people have access to any of the signals they'd need to actually, well, I guess it's now everyone's doing inside a training, it doesn't really matter. but it feels like following one's nose or like actually understanding for fundamentals doesn't

really matter. Like you've got enough deals that are just completely fake with AMD and Broadcom and all that. I'm very much focusing on tech stocks. The market isn't reacting to reality if it ever did. I don't know. I'm trying to work out whether this is a remarkable era or just one of many pants shittings for the market. 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 skyrocketed. rocket or whatever. And those companies definitely will get hit. But the way that 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 thing 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?

No, I'm going to look him up as we're speaking. Serenity, this guy started talking about this company. The ticker symbol is A-X-T-I. 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 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. This company has $23 million of quarterly revenue. Yeah. I mean, 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, 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 Web3. 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. Yeah. Yeah, 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 Robin Hood 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 over. And those are the people who were speculating on AMC cinema stock, right? Exactly. And, you know, but this has been going on for years. You guys just don't understand. I thought this all dissipated and 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 are 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, it's finally going to hit. And I'm going to be able to, I'm going to be able to get myself out of this hole. It's just absolutely insane. Not only that, but a lot of these, uh, the, the, the crypto thing is huge because as we all know now, not crypto itself is dead, but definitely the alt coin market that everybody is playing. It's over there. All of those people now. You guys are saying my fart coin's not coming back.

Farcoyne is fucking dead. Damn. It is a... God fucking damn it. Fartcoin is pretty much my entire portfolio. That didn't cash. Brother, I owned some, which is really pathetic. Hell yeah, dude. I was up like a hundred.

guy who invest in anything. Like, you want to find the upside where you can. Yeah, I got to seek that alpha. But a lot of those... What does alpha mean? 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, 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 Robin Hood, 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 trade it, 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 soy 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. This is just, this is lit. Oh my God, it's literally the crypto. It's, fuck it is. It's the same thing. Yeah.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah. And it feels like everybody's getting rich except for me. 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 yolo my life savings into 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. 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 Slogendorfenberg or something. Oh, yeah, Slogendorfenberg. He was just a guy, just a normal guy who turned, I'm not exaggerating,

$5,000 into $100 million over the course of 2020 to 2023. 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, 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 got to 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? Well, this guy's like, trading is easy. What you were describing is walking around a casino and being like, why am I not making money? Everyone's cheering. Yeah. If this is so scary,

how much of, do you know how much of the stock market is made up of retail investors are regular people now? I don't know, but I know it's a substantial amount. It's too much. It's substantial enough that it legitimately moves markets now. That's so bad. Yeah. 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 SpongeTech 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 went from like 10 cents 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... Which almost has like a negative impact, though, because... Yeah, like how... Being able to share information doesn't meet the information is useful or good. Right. 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, and they end up starting... They end up starting subredits 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. I'm going to be honest. I do this with, are 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.

Oh, yeah, I saw that. Well, that's going to be good. What does that mean? What do you mean the fucking commodities of fucking compute? What are you talking about? It sounds a lot like Enron in the early 2000s when they were trying to. 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. I remember. Which I wish they would have done. I don't remember when it happened. but I remember, yeah. Well, I've watched the smartest guys in the room three or four times now. Yeah.

And, no, they literally were trying to move into weather trading, which rules. Yep. You can now, in their commercials, we're like, what was their slogan? It was like, why not? I think that was their slogan. It was like Enron. I kind of. Why not?

I just watched the other guys last night, and there's like the massive fraudster paid by Steve Coogan in it, and they won't say what they do. it's like, we're in everything. Yeah. But what? I just, I just feel like at this point, this market is the most griftable in the world. Oh, I mean, Trump himself, you know, the whole thing's a casino. Oh, the oil shorting.

Yeah, I mean, the, truly, the leader of the country is the biggest grifter. It's, uh, every Friday and Monday, he's doing his little narrative, his little narrative truths to, to manipulate the market. it. 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. Couple things. I remember the most frustrated I was just piggybacking off the nebious shareholders. There was a similar kind of fanfare all around quantum computing stocks last year.

And I, my enterprising dumb ass, 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 kidding. Coming up with slurs for quantum computers. Oh, man. Oh, yeah.

I was turning racist. I was getting all kinds of anger because I was just getting my ass blown out. Which was very funny. I mean, we're looking at these companies. Probably don't for that. The million dollar market caps. This company is like it sold one computer in 2025 or something and it's just blasting off. 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. I'm like, fuck you. But then 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, they're all tweeting like,

they're trying to force the meme, essentially, of being like, I've seen that fail in crypto so many times. Yeah. But to answer you, to 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 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 you out. I saw the grandma tweet earlier is looking at stock charts. So I think that if and when we see. That's exactly what happened with Enron. Yeah. It's the same thing. I think that when and if we get a significant pullback on the Korean index on the Kaspi,

we will see a lot of people talking about contagion, and especially in the higher-held names that Korean, you know, the number one retail ones like Soxel 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 adjust. 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 $1,000. Then it's at $1,400. I think today it hit $1,500 a share. This is fucking, and Micron is just, they're just going parabolic. And somewhere there's some kid in Korea. just what's he doing slurping on Bibbibbop

and I'm going Is that what it is Bulgogi And he's going like Hot damn I can Take my Take my girlfriend out

Or boyfriend You know We live in the 21st century 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. And you like Bibbibbap? I love Bibbimbap. I can't we have a, wouldn't that be beautiful? If the Korean boy makes his money

on the long side and then I, his American counterparty makes money on the short side. Let's just hope he gets out in time and it all works out for you. That's exactly right. And I hope everyone gets Bibbap. The Korean grocery vegetable lady out there, God, I hope she brings the register.

That's who I hope is really ringing the register. Yeah. But it's the modern day shoe shiner. You know, it's the Korean vegetable lady. 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 bit for a guest that I just joked about it with. I live in cash for many reasons that I won't go into.

It's 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, it is better.

I don't know if I agree. Like, when I first got to America in 2008, I remember there were like investor newsletters. There were like 70 of them. Oh, yeah. That was a big one too. 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. Yeah. And they used to have a strategy back then where they would say you had a thousand subscribers to your newsletter. You would send one pick to 100 people, one to another 100 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, you know, 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 it. It was some stupid name. I don't know. But I remember the name of the company, Sinicor, and the ticker symbol was S-Y-N-C. And I bought it in like 2010 because they had had some previous winners that went out. up like 2,000 percent. 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. 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 took out my phone and I took out the calculator and 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 fucking, and there was no air conditioning in the building,

and it was always like 85 degrees in there every day. And I had a coworker who had a chronic, like, throat clearing thing. So I'd just go back to my desk, and this guy's just going, like every 10 seconds. Oh, brother. I would become a serial killer. Oh, I was like, you didn't have it back then, but I wanted to become the Joker. I mean, that's what, you're joking, but that's what's true.

You did have the Joker back then. Oh, yeah. Well, not like that. Not like I'm going to become a joke yet to be created. 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. Becoming insane. There was a stock that I talked about on our show. It was called Bloom. It is called Bloom Energy. The ticker symbol is B.E.

And Ed, I famously owned this in the teens. And I sold it. And it's now it like- Jesus, man. Yeah, you see that chart? It's up to like $280 a share. Well, what I also see is the receipt I have for how much Oracle is paying them. Oh, yeah.

That was a newly announced thing. Oh, no, I'm looking at the actual receipt. Oh, shit. 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 to you. Like, things being bad now doesn't matter as long as the insane people have led it. This all sounds like Enron. Plus Crypto, it's terrifying to me. IHartRadio.ca. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

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Together, we're going to have meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges. I've gone through breast cancer and then helped my mother through breast cancer, and that was more difficult. There's a lot of people who understand postpartner depression. I was not prepared for postpartum anxiety. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

A decade ago, the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil. So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tokitines to Madagroso. And he brought a team of executives. They were going to help the country get in on a gold rush. Carbon and its derivatives are going to be really the next great commodity that the globe's going to trade. But back home in Iowa, trouble was brewing. If you live in Iowa, your land, your water, and your voice could all be at risk thanks to a man named Bruce Rastetter.

Now people are questioning if his climate solutions have anything to do with climate at all. You got to give Bruce and the guy's credit. They're Republicans. They don't get a bit of money. On this season of drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of how the ethanol kingpin of Iowa became the king of corn in Brazil, and what it tells us about the limits of technology and markets, to solve the climate crisis. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 I was like, I'm going to lose money because something happened.

Or I'm not going to make money because I sold it too soon. Right. Like all of that sounds horrible to me. It's, yeah, it sucks shit sometimes. But what I was going to say, Someone actually left a comment recently. I forgot where, but they said that they bought that Bloom Energy stock when I talked about.

And they were like, I'm up 300%. Thanks, Ben. Wow. And I'm like, cool, dude. Enjoy yourself. Remember to pay yourself and not just let it sit there. Do your listeners get mad at you if you, like, do you give stock advice? I know you talk about your own trading.

Good. I talk about my own trades, but I have been sure to remind people that like none of this. I mean, people know by now. And talk about it in like entertainment purposes of like, here's how not like never you should buy this or any of that. Yeah. I have said like I really like this for the following reasons kind of thing. 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. I mean, but 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 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 all those permables were calling for a big crash because of all of these factors,

I was like, I believe them. that they're idiots because, but like, idiots. I'm looking at everything going, yeah, how the fuck is everything not just taking a nose dive? Yeah. And the answer is... It's a lot of factors.

It feels like the market doesn't want it to. 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. Yeah, right. It's a lot of

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 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, what used to take months to, to process information and to process catalysts now takes weeks if not days, if not hours sometimes. The thing I've been in I've been enjoying right now

is everyone's talking about CPUs instead of GPUs. You heard this? You think that? Yeah, CPUs are so back. The hottest thing right now. AMD is going to make all the CPU revenue.

And it's like they have forgotten that like eight months ago, nine months ago, AMD promised to sell 10% of it stock to Open AI, never happened. Broadcom, 10 gigawatts never happened. Broadcom is up now because the market is slightly deciding they kind of don't like Nvidia. It just feels, 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 it's just like if- logic into this. That's the problem. You're thinking too rationally about it. And yeah, I think it's all going to like

get absorbed and pivot. Like if the whole AI thing goes bust, I don't think we're even going to see this like bubble burst thing that everyone's expecting. Everyone's just going to start being like robotics. Robotics is what 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 going to go on. Robics is going to be the next theme, I think. You think that's why they go off to AI? I think that there's, you can, you can put your ear to the ground with... Robotics and maybe space and... With finance, Twitter, robotics. Robotics were, 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 going to be seeing, I think, a return to the robotics trade. Nice. And the physical AI thing. And of course, yeah, you've got... You've got the big IPOs coming with fucking SpaceX and... He's going to put a million people on Mars. He's going to put a million people on Mars.

But the thing is, here's the thing. With that, with the big IPOs, the anthropics, the open AIs, I don't think those do go public. I don't think... I think that their S-1's going to look like a dog's dinner on Thanksgiving and then his asshole on the other way. Because it's... The thing is, even in an illogical market,

Yep. 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. Like they don't want... They're fully absorbed in SpaceX, too. Insane. I'm sorry, I called it XAI. It's SpaceX now. It's SpaceX now. Yeah. Yeah. Ah. 250 billion dollar value. It's just like you're borrowing from Peter to pay Elon. You're borrowing from Elon to pay Elon. But also the other thing is, is 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 Open AI. How? You just keep trading back and forth,

you know. That money needs to make sense because if I give, SpaceX buys Tesla cybertruck. and it's all just a, oh, oh, oh, oh. I just mean the stock themselves. Anyway, 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 going to 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 going to 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 Sandysk, like Micron, like AMD, etc. So people would dump them?

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 is buying the optimist 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 going to make a bunch of cars and then blast them into space. Well, they're going to go build our little Mars civilization. who's paying for that? Oh my God. Is Blackstone buying the fucking robots and then going now send them to Mars?

It's going to be good for Tesla. 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. Which I understand. Oh, full. 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.

Oh, I fully would be a psycho. I'd be a psycho. I'd be like, 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. And I'd think that the CEO was omniscient and I would follow him to the ends of the earth. You don't get it.

This whole time, he was making outrageous claims and no one believed him. 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 Kathy Wood in the Ark. Oh, you mean, the dumbest, what's her returns like?

Now, not good. But, yeah, like, her whole thing was betting in 2021, right? Yeah, she was, 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, 90 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 Kathy Woodlady is really, for a lady, she's got a good, she's got the Midas Touch.

And then they were also calling for cybercabs and autonomous stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. Did you hear that that's going to be a $34 trillion industry by $20? Oh, yeah. 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 going to make millions of these cybercabs. And Optimus robots are going to be building the cybercats.

And they're only going to cost $30,000. Yeah. And get this, Elon's going to blast the cybercabs into 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 eating.

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. The Twitter algorithm is evil. And like I looked for that AXTI stock. And now I've just got four or five different. psychopaths being like, this is the future. This is the...

I'm going to buy the lasers. The lasers will be the biggest stock I've ever seen. Yum. Yeah. Yeah. Once you click one cash tag, as they call them, you are then inundated with all kinds of pumping tweets. But, yeah, it's frustrating.

How much of that do you think is bots and how much do you think it is organic? 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 you'll see what it's musical chairs because me as a momentum trader again I'm like I don't want to I'm not here to judge a momentum trader sorry

just just writing the trend like okay if a correct thing of me to have done but I didn't do would have been to recognize the 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 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.

What's the thing? I invest in words. What's that? I invest in words and no one can see what 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 the fact that the place. 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 the same fate will meet a lot of these

high flyers right now it's just a question of when yeah but I think I'm just talking about broadly the entire market right yeah yeah yeah like the the just the experience of we have a market that is somewhat dictated

by Twitter psychopaths is really bad yeah it's not good and it's 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 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, yeah. Got a great stock. 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, fuck. I don't even understand what this company does. Palantir.

Get the fuck out of here. Fucking god damn. 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. No, I don't think there's any fixing this other than massive amounts of pain. And the fact they want to move to semi-annual earnings is fucking bonkers. That is the craziest move for the one.

trading. 24-7 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 vagabonds. And at least with the slot machines, you have those fun sounds that are stimulating. I will fully admit there have been times that have been very anxious in my life where I've just listened to casino sounds.

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

It's got to be intentional. Of course. They figured it out. They're pumping in oxygen, so you're feeling good. And it just feels good. They figured out the perfect, phonic. Yeah.

Yeah. And I remember loving the bacon that I had at that Hara's breakfast buffet. Oh, the buffets. The buffets in casinos are just fucking amazing. 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, thank you. I've stopped. I will not hear Vegas slant here. All right, fellas, I'm going to wrap it here. Where can people find you? Ben and Emile Show. If you just Google the Ben and Emile Show, you go on YouTube, you go on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

Instagram, Twitter, you know, Ben, Ben and Mealshow.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. You'll find it all at our YouTube page and Instagram stuff. It's all there. We love taking the piss out of this whole racket. And I do too. Listeners, you'll have a monologue. I apologize that I missed last week. My life is being crazy. But I really appreciate you. Be patient with me and have another monologue. We 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 Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed. At to visit the Discord.

and go to our slash better offline to check out R-R-Offline to check out R-R-R-R-R-Dent. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Joy is essential, and it's also elusive.

But now, there's a new and exciting way to start your journey toward a more joyful existence. Joy 101. It's a new podcast hosted by me, Hoda Kotby. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting, and moving on-air chats. Open your free IHeart Radio app. Search Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby is presented by CVS.

Hey, this is Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, and we're submitting our most sciencey episodes for your peer review with our new Stuff You Should Know doing science playlist. now. You want to know about Occam's razor? Simplest explanation is usually the right one? We got you covered. Wondered what chaos theory is ever since the first time you saw Jurassic Park. Well, come on down. So distill a nice pot of tea, everybody. Turn down the gas on your Bunsen burner and slip into your most comfortable lab coat and listen to the stuff you should know doing science playlist on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

June is Black Music Month, and on the Drink Chams podcast, we're speaking with the hottest names in the culture, like Sway Lee. Do you realize how legendary you are? I appreciate that. I'd be seeing it, but I'm like, man, I still got like so much more to do. Like Prince, he dropped like 30 albums. We dropped like five right now. That's the rate we gotta be going. Yep, that's a good attitude. No matter the era, Drink Chams brings you the biggest names and the most unfiltered

conversations. Listen to Drink Chams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This season on my podcast, Here's the Thing. I talk to composer Mark Shaman. It's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. And director Morgan Neville.

Film School teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentary is all by your ear. What do you hear? I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast

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