It Could Happen Here - The Fakest Economy of All Time

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Mia is joined by writer Vicky Osterweil to discuss the rollercoaster of the Korean stock market and how it’s gambling all the way down Sources:https://bsky.app/profile/assignedmale.bsky.social/post/3mp7473bzrs2e https://www.investopedia.com/single-stock-etf-5667162 https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-kospi-plunges-nearly-10-after-regulator-cautions-leveraged-etfs-2026-06-23/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-watchdog-regrets-rushed-launch-leveraged-etfs-considering-measures-2026-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/south-korea-market-watchdog-issues-warning-leveraged-stock-investments-2026-06-18/ https://www.barrons.com/articles/sk-hynix-stock-kospi-2503fa2d https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20260626005600320 https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/investing/tech-stocks-nasdaq-kospi https://www.businessinsider.com/korea-kospi-stock-market-price-today-nikkei-softbank-tech-selloff-2026-6 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Iqadap and hear a podcast coming to you from what they are calling the fakesest economy of all time. I am your host Mia Wong. And with me to discuss really truly a stock market that is like, like a microcosm of all of the unhinged things they are going on in the economy is friend of the show, Vicky Osterwhile, who has done many, many, many, many things. Writers and organizer, recent author, current author? I just an author now, I think. I have two books. Yeah, two books makes you an author.

That's right. Hi, how's it going? How's it going on me? How are you doing this beautiful June day? Awful, absolutely terrible. The whole world is on fire, both metaphorically and literally. You tried to learn about the economy again, didn't you? This is what happens.

You should never look. Don't turn over that rock. Don't turn over that rock. Huge mistake. Yeah. I am learning about financial instruments that are so deranged. They make the stuff that 2008 financial collapses 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 when I am calling a bonus horror. I love a bonus. This bonus horror. Now, I think you are one of the people who is the most uniquely qualified to address this bonus horror. As someone who has recently written a book called The Extended Universe, How Disney Killed the Movies and Took Over the World, that is about the evils of intellectual property. Anne Housel 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 in 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 Nikki what do you think about the phenomenon of trademarking a riot? Happy pride first of all I think

I think it's really important that we celebrate June this year in all the right ways Yeah, I mean, you know, trademarking a riot, that seems good. Like, you trade on a historical event, copyrighting a historical era, you know, 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 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 in? Did you ever think about them and their interests? I don't think you did. 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, I'm, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's the Pontchus Polly that is the good guy in the Jesus story theory, right? Yeah. You know, like, well, if it weren't for the Roman centurians, you know, who would have, who would have sacrificed Jesus? Yeah, no, 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 a happy, happy pride. Love a business gay, you know, I just love a business gay. The feeling I saw seeing that, the only feeling I've had like that recently was discovering that the NCAA was like selling the NCAA was like selling the. a biometrics data of their athletes

to sports gambling companies so the sports gambling companies could set lines. Seems right. Which is like, I can't 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 of like, I don't

know. This is, this is maybe the worst, maybe the worst economy that we've had. 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. Yeah. And, oh, boy, today, today we are going on what I am, I am colloquially

referring to as the KOSP roller coaster. Yay. Let's go. Oh, boy. So KCpe 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 don't know. NASDAQ or the SMP 500. Yeah, it's like, it's like that, basically. It's an index. It's the main major index of major Korean stocks. Yeah. And people, long-time 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 percentage of these stock listings, right? So the reason I want to talk about KOSP, the South Korean one, is because in a lot of ways, it's like the entire economy and a microcosm. because, you know, whereas the U.S. has like seven tech stocks that are like a huge percentage of the market. Kostby over half of the fucking index is two companies.

Yeah. Samsung and S.K. Hayeks, which are... That's that good. That's that good economy. Yeah. And again, 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. Yeah, graphics cards. They're doing it, it's because graphics cards are so valuable. That's what this is all about. Yeah, this is now like half of the main index of like one of the most advanced industrial economies

in human history, right? Is fucking making graphics cards for chatbots? South Korea is what, the 13th, the 12th or 13th largest in the entire world in its two companies, right? 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 Cospy 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. This used to happen in the 19th century all the time.

So what we're looking at in Korea and indeed in the U.S. 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 you'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, But in the last month, two months, I don't remember exactly when this happened, Korean stocks got

added to like Robin Hood, 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 Wall Street bets or whatever. But it was hard. 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 word 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, right? The thing is, what's happening is that the Korean retail market has also exploded.

So not only are you getting U.S. investors, right, like day traders, just like going on really weird tips and like pouring millions and millions of U.S. dollars, right? Because like, you know, if it used to be hard to trade on the U.S. Stock Exchange, trading in a foreign stock was basically impossible. Yeah. You just couldn't do it. Again, you technically could. But you had to have a lot of money and a lot of connections. Yeah, you got to actually be someone who worked in finance. Yes. Like, you know, like you had to be effectively a professional. Exactly. 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 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. Exactly. But so the opening up and the deregulation of this trade has this is sort of maybe it can be a little hard to grasp, but like, so

the Korean economy is massive, but compared to the U.S. economy, it's nothing, right? So when all of the money from, when a ton of retail money from the U.S., 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, you add that 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, right, 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.

Yeah. But these retail investors don't really care because it's gambling. It's just a gambling app, right? They're gambling on stocks. Yep. But now 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 and 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 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.

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, 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 U.S. 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 KOSP. So they're like, guys, 4201 is this company. I'm telling you, 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 you've got these U.S. 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 really random companies that make really obscure. They're basically what would have been penny stocks back of the day. Yeah. And they're getting traded at wild volumes. And 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. Yeah. There's obviously this sort of like ground swam 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 Vicki before I started this. So 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. Yeah, you described one to me And I literally was stunned in silence

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So what we've been talking about thus far has been, you know, like the entire economy now is someone who thinks they got a tip on the horses and is putting their life-saving. in on like fucking, I don't know what, what's a horse name, like, secretary, I don't know. Sweet Mondays. Yeah, sweet Mondays. That would. Yeah, I don't know. She's great in the rain.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. 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. Yeah, totally. You're putting the money in. You can only lose that much money.

Now, if the stuff of 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 could 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 22nd, Coastby did a thing that it does semi-normally, which is, again, lose 10% and trigger the circuit breakers. They trigger the circuit breakers, like, again, like today, we were recording this on June 26th, a thing that, again, is not supposed to happen in normal markets. Like, no. That's panic shit. But on Monday, it triggered because Korea's, like, national, like, financial watchdog.

Like, the guy you ran it was like, okay, maybe, maybe. Maybe it was a mistake for regulators to have approved this thing called leverage ETFs on a single stock. Okay, so to understand how bonkers this is, like 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? 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. Yeah. The place you might have heard of this is, there were a bunch of, like, supposedly like green ETFs. They 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 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. Right. It's a basket of companies. Yes. Now, now, it lasts about seven years, right? This is a relatively recent from. I'm sure people maybe had like done something like this before that, but this is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Somebody had the absolutely horrible idea of what if you had an ETF that was just one stock. Well, but me, that doesn't make any sense. They're all the same thing. Yeah, right. And I look at this. I was like, what the fuck are you talking about that? Like, 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? You just buy the stock. Yeah, right. You buy the stock or you buy a future 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 Vicky kind of came up with the best way to describe this that I've heard, which is like, it's like getting a parlay on a stock.

Yeah. So one of the very formative moments of Mia childhood, right, was reading this book by Corey Doctor, a 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 in between the plot, there will just be a chapter that is Corey Doctoro 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? Or 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 several things that are different happen, right?

So, for example, it's like if LeBron scores 32 and Wembe has three blocks. And I beat the point spread by five, right? Yeah, right. Then you get paid out $100 million, whatever, right? And that's sort of extreme example. That's a parlay. That's a sports parley. Yeah, that's a sports parley.

Every single time someone is doing that is a scam. 100% it is a scam. If you put your money into this, you are lighting it the fuck on fire. Yeah. 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 the 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 of the sites will tell you do not hold this thing for. for longer than one day. Yeah. 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. Yep. On the stock, you are betting to go up going up. Yeah. Because it's this like fucking unhinged set of parlay. It's all these conditionals on it. So like,

it has to go up within a certain time window, or it has to bounce, right? to go down, then up or something like that, right? Just a bunch of weird conditions. Yeah, and you can lose more money on this than you put in. How does that? Which is insane.

Because you have to pay out all of the options that you take in. Right, of course. So you can lose more money than you put in. Oh, my God. 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. You can lose your family's life savings on this shit. Like, I think it's like

Famously, it's always good to go into debt to your bookie. This is famously, it's famously good to get credit from your, from your sports gambler. That's a famous, a famous narrative thing that's good to do. 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 cause the market to tank by 10%. Yeah.

Just saying like. Exactly. There's a lot of different angles on the, this that we could go into. Sorry, is it okay if I switched to like some U.S. stuff for an example?

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, he'd be like pieces here, right? There's just like a really open trade that he was just making and it worked because it worked. Right? It was 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. So the thing about the AI stuff is that 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 Zittron, who I know is part of the network has done a lot of reporting on the money's not actually being spent. No, it doesn't actually. But it's bullshit. But so, yes, exactly. So it's all bullshit.

These are these bullshit companies that 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 think. He managed to do a pump and dump with his own company. 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 going to hand it to him. You don't have to hand it to him, but it's truly one of the.

craziest scams that, like, 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. Yeah. So you've got these like really nasty instruments that they're developing to rinse Korean grocers of their, you know, 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&S. when it gets added to these indexes,

everyone holding an index fund has to buy those stocks. So it means that 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.

Yep. Lying goes up, no problem. So when the SpaceX IPO happened, I listed at 160, so on that, 160, was it 169. I don't remember the exact number. I think that was it, I 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. Yeah, something like 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 reasonable.

That is actually like regulated. It's a reasonable thing. So what happened was the price retailers drove it way up, right? Elon still has, you know, 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 190, 200. 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 valuating it.

Yeah. 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 down to 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. Yep. 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. Yeah. So this is, this is the

California pension fund. Exactly. Exactly. 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, what they learned from cryptos and NFTs is, oh, we can just do that. in the stock market too, right? Yeah. We can just do it.

We can just play the entire stock market like this, you know, and we can blame it on, you know, I started by talking about the retail investors, and that's real. 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?

Oh, I don't remember. I don't remember if we actually talked about it on the show or 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 the 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? The private equity, and the thing about private equity is that it's what if a bank had no regulation. Yeah. 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?

All tech investors are taking all of their money out of everything and putting it in AI. They're going all in on AI. That's why they're 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 greenlit. There is just no capital for anything except AI. The entire economy. has put all of its resources into LLMs. Yep. 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. Yeah. Incredible economy. It's astounding. It's like the entire, it's like every rich person on Earth

has collectively taken all of humanity's chips and put it on tulip bulbs. Yeah. You know, I compare 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 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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Okay, if you know me, you know this. I'm always searching for inspiration, for support, and useful tools to help maximize joy. So this podcast lets us uncover all of that together. We're going to have these meaningful conversations with the world's most fascinating people, like when actress Olivia Munn shared how she overcame fierce health challenges that she never saw coming. 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. Olympic champ Sean Johnson revealed why she had no choice but to be a gymnast. There was something about gymnastics that was intoxicating to me. It's given me a belief that we all have one of those treasures inside of us. We just have to find it. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 got to be going. Yeah, that's a good attitude.

You also hear stories from industry legends and hip-hop pioneers like Fab Five Freddy. I directed whenaz's early videos. Which one? One love. Wow. I literally filmed in his apartment in Queensbridge. His moms were still up in that apartment. Nans was just beginning to take off.

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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 AI boom is inevitable and it's going to make money. Yeah. And the second one,

and this is also directly tied to South Korea, is that the war on Iran is going to end and it's going to end soon. Yep. Because if both of these things are not true, and... They're not true. 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% 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. Yeah.

And so you're just in this perpetual cycle, right? We're 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, the rest of like East and South Asia, particularly is getting fucked by all of this. As we talked about elsewhere on this show.

But South Korea is the core industrial center. Yeah. That's the most fucked by this specifically because they rely so much on natural gas and just regular, like regular fossil fuels that come to the Strait of Hermuz, which is not open, has never been opened, will not be reopened. 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's 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. Yeah. Ben Gavir only holds a minor. a post in the Israeli government. Hold on. I am Googling this live.

God damn it. God damn it. Oh, wow. Checks notes. He is the Minister of National Security. Oh, no. Oh, no. So, of course, you know, we talk about the economy, and obviously, the harder in Lebanon and Palestine is the most horrible, and Iran, is the most horrible thing going on right now.

But these cascading effects are also horrible. Yeah. If we've learned one thing for the last 10 years, it's that it can always get worse for everyone. Oh, yeah. So we have this moment where, like, everyone is gambling on South Korean chip manufacturers, right? Yep. 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,

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... And also, and also, one final point about this, right? Yeah.

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 the money because more people using it is actually bad for them because if those people use tokens, they're selling the tokens below cost.

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 truly terrifying. But I think the thing that I think I really want to underline to me, I 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 pretty 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 like one last job at the level of like global delusion. 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. We made this money. They're lighting it on fire so that they can get 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 honestly, most of them are going to get out. And we're going to be the ones holding the bag. And we're 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. 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 has. hasn't even gone off yet. Right.

Like the economy hasn't blown up. And loki, the demand's 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. So, so. Unfortunately, the problem is at the same time, we're also, all of all of, for new economic growth is entirely

in like fucking gas turbines. They're never going to run. It's like, it's, you know, it's fine. It's fine. Those are never going to run. Well, no, they've, they have definitely poisoned a shit ton of people. Oh, absolutely. Oh, yes, absolutely. No, no, no doubt. No doubt. Yeah. But I also think that like,

you know, like, to some extent, like part of the strategy here, right, if, if you look at sort of, like, what venture capital is doing this, their plan is like, okay, yeah, we can, 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 creating our own sort of fascist corporate autocracies. Totally. But they don't have to be right about that. Like they just don't. 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 when they're reaping. I said there's nothing we can do about it. 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. 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 morbunded for an extremely long period 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. I mean, I don't see what could go wrong for them. I think I'm going to 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? They had their time. Our time is coming soon. It could happen here. It Could Happen here is a production of Coolzone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, Coolzone Media.

or check us out on the IHeart Radio 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. 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 Kotvi. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting,

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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. Like, that's the rate we got to 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. Hey, this is Chuck from Stuff You Should Know, and we're submitting our most sciencey episodes

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