The Insanity of the Markets with Ben & Emil

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 https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv 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: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  This is Alexis Christofres for Bloomberg Surveillance. Most companies have tried AI. Most aren't seeing results. Not because AI doesn't work. It's because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams. Ready-to-go AI teammates pre-built for marketing, ops, and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already onboarded in your workflows, ready to deliver. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A dot com.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:44Ed Zitron?

  Me, Momo Redzitron, and this is Better Offline.

• 1:59Ed Zitron?

  Download a T-shirt or subscribe to the newsletter using the links in the profile notes to support the Greater Zitron Crusades. But today I'm joined by two of the finest finance podcasters alive. That's right, we've got Ben and Emile from the Ben and Emile Show. Fellas, thank you for joining me.

• 2:15Speaker 06

  Wow, thank you so much. Thank you for having us. Cue the applause. And you can't see it, but we're both, we're both wearing matching gray shirts today.

• 2:21Ed Zitron?

  It's beautiful.

• 2:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:24Ed Zitron?

  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.

• 2:36Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:37Ed Zitron?

  I can't draw one of those.

• 2:39Speaker 06

  We spent $100,000 on this studio and it's just a money pit. We keep throwing money at, much like, um, much like, uh, people keep throwing money at these memory stocks.

• 2:49Ed Zitron?

  Whoa.

• 2:50Speaker 06

  Louise, these Koreans.

• 2:53Ed Zitron?

  No, 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, 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.

• 3:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:18Ed Zitron?

  And it's usually an Axios article about oil.

• 3:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, oil, these days, it doesn't matter anymore. I mean, I am, I'm really, really dialed in on finance Twitter and I have been for a long time and it's become a really, really fascinating place. Uh, 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, um, uh, there was Investors, uh, Investors Hub was another one, but that was mostly for penny stocks. There are a bunch

• 4:06Speaker 06

  of other little ones, but now Twitter is the single, it's a hive mind and.

• 4:14Speaker 06

  It's I was having trouble kind of putting it into words or putting my thoughts together last night, but it really is like you can gauge the sentiment so easily just on finance Twitter. And yeah, the market was caring. The market just it's like a child with ADD and it loses its focus. All it takes is a couple of 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 it's

• 4:55Speaker 06

  and depending on who you ask, oh, it's it's priced in, the market is forward looking. And that's, is it of is it a function of people just looking for a story afterward to excuse and explain the fact that the market doesn't care anymore? I don't know. But yeah, it just doesn't seem to care. Yeah. Brent crude is at like, last I checked, like 110 a barrel. And a month ago, that would have spelled disaster for the S and P. But now it just doesn't, it doesn't matter anymore because now the narrative has shifted. Everybody's focused on memory stocks and in semiconductors, the the the SOX, the semiconductor ETF has just been on a parabolic run.

• 5:39Ed Zitron?

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

• 5:45Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 5:46Ed Zitron?

  Effectively.

• 5:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:47Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 5:48Speaker 06

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

• 5:56Ed Zitron?

  Oh, the Kospi, the Kospi show. Yeah, sorry.

• 6:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. This thing is it's gone parabolic and it's kind of there was.

• 6:08Speaker 06

  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, 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.

• 6:29Ed Zitron?

  Interesting.

• 6:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I think what we're seeing right now is the same thing because someone posted that like the top five stocks and ETFs owned by Korean retail, number one is, I believe, SanDisk, number two is the SOX, I want to say number three is like SMH, which is another semiconductor ETF. And god damn, is it just, it's unbelievable. It's like not, every day. And just when you think, oh, man, oh, I want to short some SanDisk because it's gone up 2,000% in the last six months, it just keeps going up every day.

• 7:09Ed Zitron?

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

• 7:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:35Speaker 06

  I think that it is.

• 7:39Speaker 07

  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.

• 7:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 07

  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 permabull.

• 7:59Speaker 06

  Perma bear.

• 8:00Speaker 07

  Sorry, permabear. And I mean, I, even this week, it's like, they'll also... Way zoom in on the, you know, S and P 500 chart and be like, uh, I believe now's a good time to exit. And then today, we're just like absolutely ripping on a Trump tweet about a potential, uh, potential Iran agreement or something.

• 8:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I think which does not exist. Like it's just Axios. It's just Axios saying, yep.

• 8:28Speaker 06

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

• 9:08Ed Zitron?

  Oh, what with the, with the really smart guy and the idiot. Yeah. And then the kind of middle ground. And it's like, no, the stocks are, the stocks are overvalued. No.

• 9:19Speaker 06

  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 Wojak with the hood being like, just buy, just buy them, you know?

• 9:30Ed Zitron?

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

• 9:38Speaker 06

  Yes, that's exactly right. Whatever move, I've told Emile this too, in our audience is like, especially on the macro side, on just like the S and P, whatever move will piss you off, will piss me off the most, tends to be the one that I'm, I'm, I'm essentially calling it what's what other people refer to as the pain trade, meaning whatever's the most painful move for the most market participants, tends to be the one that occurs and follows through. And when you've got like the, I don't know why I'm gesturing because nobody can see me. But, um, when you've got like a, when you've got a sharp, Decline like we had a few weeks back, I believe now like six weeks ago.

• 10:21Speaker 06

  When you've got a sharp decline like that and then a nice tradable bottom occurs on a lot of volume. Meaning there's, it's like a lot of people are coming in and, 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.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  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, is, is a very simple, simplistic way of putting it.

• 11:32Ed Zitron?

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

• 12:05Speaker 07

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

• 12:13Speaker 06

  Bogle head over here.

• 12:14Ed Zitron?

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

• 12:20Speaker 07

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

• 12:53Speaker 06

  I think also that there was someone from the administration today who

• 12:56Speaker 07

  Kevin Hassett, who was like

• 12:58Speaker 06

  The consumer is strong.

• 12:59Speaker 07

  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. It's like, dude, I do not think you have your finger

• 13:12Speaker 06

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

• 13:35Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 13:36Speaker 06

  It's just like, oh, yeah, this is

• 13:37Ed Zitron?

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

• 13:42Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 13:43Ed Zitron?

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

• 13:48Speaker 06

  It doesn't matter. Yeah.

• 13:51Ed Zitron?

  Nothing really matters.

• 13:53Speaker 06

  Nothing really matters. And I think the, there's just so much money out there on the sidelines. There's, 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.

• 14:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 07

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

• 14:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. So in the, yeah.

• 14:28Ed Zitron?

  And in the hopes that it doesn't go, go down further.

• 14:32Speaker 06

  Well.

• 14:34Ed Zitron?

  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 investor as it could get. Cause 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 insider trading. It doesn't really matter, but it, it feels like following one's nose or like actually understanding fundamentals doesn't really matter. Like you've got enough deals that are just completely fake with AMD and Broadcom and all that. That it's, I'm very much focusing on tech stocks.

• 15:10Ed Zitron?

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

• 15:22Speaker 06

  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, the worry is can this be sustained? Is this real? And surely throughout the way up, there are companies that are going to have poor earnings or suspend dividends or have their capex suddenly skyrocket or whatever. And those companies definitely will get hit, but the way that, the way that things are going currently with the way things are trending, everybody just kind of shifts their focus

• 16:06Speaker 06

  on, 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. This, I, they're an anonymous account. They're called Serenity something. But this guy, um, do you, do you know who I'm talking about?

• 16:25Ed Zitron?

  No, I'm going to look him up as we're speaking.

• 16:28Speaker 06

  Serenity, this guy started talking about this company, the ticker symbol is A X T I. And I'm so pissed because.

• 16:39Speaker 06

  I saw this tweet and I saw people talking about it and it's like, oh, they, they, 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, this company is so pivotal to, uh, to the entire, um, 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, uh, supply chain? So I, I was like, this is too good to be true. It's one of those things where, you know,

• 17:23Speaker 06

  it probably is just getting a pump and it'll just flounder. And it has gone 10x since then. It is now trading.

• 17:30Ed Zitron?

  This company has $23 million of quarterly revenue.

• 17:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the thing is, uh, they, but then you have companies like this, um, 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 gonna, uh, they were starting to get contracts or something. And then, uh, just like a week ago, the stock collapsed 40%.

• 17:57Ed Zitron?

  Ben, I'm sorry. This actually does rely, 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 web three for this. And this one is going to speed up web three. We need to, you need to buy this token because it's going to 10x. It's the same, except it's now the stock market.

• 18:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 07

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

• 18:57Ed Zitron?

  And those are the people who were speculating on AMC cinema stock, right?

• 19:00Speaker 07

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

• 19:03Speaker 06

  You guys just don't understand.

• 19:04Speaker 07

  I thought this all dissipated and we we made some like offhand comments about how crazy the AMC thing is. And for about a week, our mentions were just like, fuck you. You don't understand AMC is the way. And so there 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.

• 19:37Speaker 06

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

• 19:51Ed Zitron?

  It's over there.

• 19:52Speaker 06

  All of those people now.

• 19:53Speaker 07

  You guys are saying my fart coin is not coming back?

• 19:55Speaker 06

  Our coin is fucking dead, man.

• 19:56Speaker 07

  Damn.

• 19:56Speaker 06

  It is.

• 19:57Ed Zitron?

  God fucking damn it.

• 20:00Ed Zitron?

  God fucking damn it. Fart coin is pretty much my entire portfolio. That and cash.

• 20:04Speaker 06

  Brother, I own some, which is really pathetic.

• 20:07Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah, dude. No, you're you're a guy. You're a guy who invests in anything. Like you want to want to find the upside where you can.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, I got to seek that alpha, but a lot of those.

• 20:19Ed Zitron?

  What does alpha mean?

• 20:20Speaker 06

  Alpha means, um, alpha means like your edge, like you're looking for any kind of, 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 Robinhood, but Interactive Brokers is 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. They're all looking at Korean names that that don't have ticker symbols. They have numbers.

• 21:04Speaker 06

  So it's like 5066 or whatever the hell. And they're just these companies that that trade at way, way lower multiples than American stocks. So all these guys are doing the same thing that they did with crypto a few years ago. They're going, oh, my God, this one has the market cornered in Korea. They do this whatever manufacturing process that is absolutely crucial to blah, blah, blah. And, you know, there was one soy tech or something.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  It went from like, you know, it's very illiquid, too. And it went from like $30 a share just a month ago. And now it's at 190. Like these.

• 21:42Ed Zitron?

  This is just, this is, oh, my God, it's literally the crypto. It is fucking, it's the same thing.

• 21:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:56Ed Zitron?

  All right, everyone, I'm back talking about Quince, one of my favorite clothing brands. And as we speak, I'm currently wearing one of their excellent cotton knit overshirts that wear like a jacket, nice pre four piece to wear as things cool off a bit. I've also been eyeballing one of their heritage water resistant Harrington jackets, too, for later in the year to pair with their Mongolian cashmere sweaters I bought. And I have several of them. And I really can't recommend Quince's stuff enough. I love Quince because they focus on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, jackets, pants, fitted tees and polos, active wear, and even travel gear. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, you're getting more for less. Find the four pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download

• 22:39Ed Zitron?

  the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was on better offline. It's the best way to support the show.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  This is Alexis Christofres for Bloomberg Surveillance. AI is everywhere. Outcomes are not. Not because AI doesn't work, but because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. The campaigns, the launches, the quarterly planning. Those workflows are still run by humans alone. AI is making individuals faster, but it's not making businesses more productive. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams. Your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready to go AI teammates pre-built for marketing, ops and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already onboarded in your workflows, ready to deliver. And the more they work with your team, the smarter they get.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or 10,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A dot com.

• 23:55Speaker 07

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 24:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's the same thing. Everybody's getting rich, except for me.

• 25:04Speaker 07

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

• 25:39Speaker 06

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

• 25:49Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, Slogan Dorfenberg.

• 25:50Speaker 06

  Slogan Dorfenberg.

• 25:53Speaker 06

  He was just a guy, just a normal guy who turned, I'm not exaggerating, $5,000 into 100 million dollars over the course of 2022, 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

• 26:35Speaker 06

  that everybody's buying. Whereas I would go, it's already run up like 500%. He's like, hot diggity, it's up 500%. I gotta get in on that. And then it goes up another thousand percent.

• 26:46Speaker 07

  Right.

• 26:46Speaker 06

  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. Fucking.

• 26:57Ed Zitron?

  What you were describing is walking around a casino and being like, why am I not making money? Everyone's cheering.

• 27:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 27:04Ed Zitron?

  If this is so scary, how much of, do you know how much of the stock market is made up of retail investors, regular people now?

• 27:12Speaker 06

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

• 27:15Ed Zitron?

  It's too much.

• 27:16Speaker 06

  I know that's substantial enough that it legitimately moves markets now. And I think that

• 27:21Ed Zitron?

  That's so bad.

• 27:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, it well, it used to be a lot worse because it was all focused on it was all fragmented and it was all focused on penny stocks. And people just going like, oh, you know, the one I like to talk about the most, the most famous one arguably was sponge tech. And sponge tech was this, it was a revolutionary new type of sponge, Ed, that had the soap built into the sponge. And it was one of the most famous ones because it, you know, it went from like 10 cents to $10 or something like that. Um, but nowadays retail is, and I put this in quotes, smarter. Only in the sense that it's a lot more coordinated and organized.

• 28:04Speaker 06

  And people can share information a lot easier and cleaner and

• 28:09Speaker 07

  Which almost has like a negative impact though, because

• 28:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, like how now, like being able to share information doesn't make the information as useful or good.

• 28:18Speaker 06

  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.

• 28:23Speaker 07

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

• 28:39Ed Zitron?

  I I'm gonna be honest, I do this with, are you familiar with Nebius?

• 28:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:46Ed Zitron?

  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.

• 29:14Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, I saw that.

• 29:15Ed Zitron?

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

• 29:23Speaker 06

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

• 29:26Ed Zitron?

  It literally is the end, the end game of Enron was that they moved into energies trading. And the last thing they wanted to do was weather trading.

• 29:34Speaker 06

  I remember.

• 29:35Ed Zitron?

  Which I wish they would have.

• 29:36Speaker 06

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

• 29:39Ed Zitron?

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

• 29:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 29:44Ed Zitron?

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

• 29:49Speaker 06

  Yep. You can now, and their commercials were like, that's, what was their slogan? It was like, why not? I think that was, I think that was their slogan. It's like, Enron, why not?

• 30:00Ed Zitron?

  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.

• 30:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. But what?

• 30:11Ed Zitron?

  I just, I just feel like at this point, this market is the most griftable in the world.

• 30:19Speaker 07

  Oh, I mean, Trump himself, every, the whole thing's a casino.

• 30:22Ed Zitron?

  Other oil shorting.

• 30:24Speaker 07

  Um, yeah. I mean, the, 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.

• 30:36Ed Zitron?

  I just, I get, at, 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.

• 30:53Speaker 06

  Couple of things. Um,

• 30:57Speaker 06

  I remember the most frustrated I was, uh, just piggybacking off the nebious shareholders. There was a similar kind of fanfare all around quantum computing stocks, uh, last year. And I, my, my enterprising dumb ass fought the trend and got short some of them. A little, just a couple of weeks too early, right before the final blow off top. And I was getting, I was just getting.

• 31:24Ed Zitron?

  Sitting around and fucking.

• 31:26Speaker 06

  Oh man, I was getting.

• 31:28Ed Zitron?

  Coming up with slurs for quantum computers.

• 31:30Speaker 06

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

• 31:40Speaker 07

  Which was very funny. I mean, we're looking at these companies.

• 31:42Ed Zitron?

  Probably.

• 31:43Speaker 06

  Million dollar market caps.

• 31:45Speaker 07

  This company's like, it, it sold one computer in 2025 or something, and it's just blasting off.

• 31:50Speaker 06

  It booked like two, six million dollars in revenues for the whole year. And the market cap was like 25 billion. And they're like, see you guys. Quantum is the future.

• 31:59Speaker 07

  I think we're going to the moon with this one.

• 32:01Speaker 06

  But then they eventually. They eventually petered out and have dropped considerably. But now it's funny because now all of the energy guys, the nuclear energy guys are trying to rally the energy sector and they're all tweeting, they're all tweeting like, they're trying to force the meme essentially of being like.

• 32:25Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no, I've seen that fail in crypto so many times.

• 32:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, but I would, to answer you, 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, 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.

• 33:10Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I saw the grandma tweet earlier.

• 33:12Speaker 06

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

• 33:16Ed Zitron?

  Exactly what happened with Enron.

• 33:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think.

• 33:20Ed Zitron?

  It's the same thing.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  I think that when and if we get a significant pullback on the Korean index on the COSPI, we will see a lot of people talking about contagion and especially in the, in the higher held names that Korean, you know, the number one retail ones like Socksil and Sandisk and all that stuff. But yeah, there's nothing quite like that pain of just going of thinking, why the fuck didn't I just buy and chase and ride the trend? I could be sitting on hundreds of thousands, if not maybe a couple million dollars from a modest position if I just,

• 34:06Speaker 06

  and they just, just when you think, I can't chase it. It's at $800 a share. I can't chase it. Then it's at a thousand, then it's at 1100, then it's at 1400. I think today it hit $1500 a share. This sand is fucking. And Micron is just, they're, they're just going parabolic. And somewhere there's some kid in Korea, just. What's he doing? Slurping on bibimbap and I'm going, I'm going.

• 34:31Speaker 06

  Is that what it is? Bulgogi?

• 34:35Speaker 06

  And he's going like, hot damn, I can take my, take my girlfriend out or boyfriend, you know, with his, uh,

• 34:43Speaker 07

  We live, we live in 21st century.

• 34:46Speaker 06

  We're progressive and I'm over here just going, god damn, that Korean guy out there on the other side of this trade. Cause I am short a little bit of sock soul and SMH, but.

• 34:56Speaker 07

  And you like Bib and Bap?

• 34:58Speaker 06

  I love Bib and Bap. I can't, can't we have a, wouldn't that be beautiful if the Korean boy makes his money on the long side and then I, the, uh, his American counterparty makes money.

• 35:08Speaker 07

  Let's just hope he gets out in time and it all works out for you.

• 35:10Speaker 06

  Exactly right. And I hope.

• 35:11Speaker 07

  Everyone gets Bib and Bap.

• 35:12Speaker 06

  The Korean grocery vegetable lady out there. God, I hope she rings the register.

• 35:17Speaker 07

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

• 35:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. But it's the, it's the modern day, uh, shoe shiner, you know, it's the Korean vegetable lady.

• 35:24Ed Zitron?

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

• 36:06Ed Zitron?

  Like when I first got to America in 2008, I remember there were like investor newsletters. There were like 70 of them.

• 36:12Speaker 06

  Oh yeah.

• 36:13Ed Zitron?

  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. It wasn't, 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.

• 36:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, and they they used to have a strategy back then where they would say you had a thousand subscribers to your newsletter. You would send one pick to a hundred people, one to another hundred people, one and you would divvy them up. And then the people who got the losers were obviously like, well, fuck this guy. The people who got the winners were like, damn, this guy's awesome. And I'm butchering this, but basically they would keep focusing on their winner subscribers and build their trust and build their rapport with that group. And they just kind of repeated that multiple times until they had, you know, 5,000 people who just trust them

• 37:25Speaker 06

  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 Synicor 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 up like 2,000%. And I thought, man, I slept on that last one. I slept on the one before because I didn't trust this group. But they seem to be the hot group right now. Wouldn't you know it? When I bought the one that they suggested, the next one, that was when their their hot streak came to a grinding halt.

• 38:05Speaker 06

  And I remember being, I bought this thing right before earnings with all of my money that I had in my trading account, which was like 18 grand or something. And the stock got cut in half immediately after earnings. And I was like, I was at my, I've told this story on the show where I was at my job that I hated, like despised. I'd worked there for nine months and I saw, oh, basically just like nine months of my, my entire job here has just been erased. I've essentially been working for free. And I went and I sat in the bathroom and I just sat there and I I took out my phone and I took out the calculator. And I 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.

• 38:49Speaker 06

  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, uh, 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.

• 39:13Ed Zitron?

  I would become a serial killer.

• 39:15Speaker 06

  Oh, I was, I was like, I'm the, you didn't have it back then, but I wanted to become the Joker.

• 39:21Speaker 07

  I mean, that's, you're, you're joking, but that's what's

• 39:23Ed Zitron?

  You did have the Joker back then.

• 39:25Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Well, not like that.

• 39:27Ed Zitron?

  Like I'm gonna be

• 39:28Speaker 06

  The meme had yet to be created.

• 39:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 07

  But that's what's so scary. We're, we're joking, but there is now, uh, basically like hundreds of thousands of these people strewn across, strewn across society, just getting hosed on stocks, uh, losing their hard earned money.

• 39:46Speaker 06

  Or in some cases, making some.

• 39:47Speaker 07

  In some cases.

• 39:49Speaker 06

  There was someone

• 39:50Speaker 07

  Becoming insane.

• 39:51Speaker 06

  There was a stock that I talked about on our show. Uh, 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.

• 40:07Speaker 06

  And it's now at like

• 40:08Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ, man.

• 40:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. You see that chart? It's up to like $280 a share.

• 40:13Ed Zitron?

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

• 40:18Speaker 06

  And, oh, yeah. That was a newly announced thing.

• 40:22Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no, I'm looking at the actual receipt.

• 40:24Speaker 06

  Oh, shit.

• 40:25Ed Zitron?

  Internal Oracle. And let me tell you something. Um, it's only for Stargate Abeline.

• 40:32Ed Zitron?

  So, I mean, long-term you'll be right, but that's the thing. None of this matters.

• 40:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:37Ed Zitron?

  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.

• 40:56Ed Zitron?

  Alright everyone, I'm back talking about Quince, one of my favourite clothing brands. And as we speak, I'm currently wearing one of their excellent cotton knit overshirts. I wear like a jacket, nice prefall piece to wear as things cool off a bit. I've also been eyeballing one of their heritage water resistant Harrington jackets too, for later in the year, to pair with their Mongolian cashmere sweaters I bought. And I have several of them and I really can't recommend Quince's stuff enough. I love Quince because they focus on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials, jackets, pants, fitted tees and polos, activewear and even travel gear. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands and because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, you're getting more for less. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince.

• 41:39Ed Zitron?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was on Better Offline. It's the best way to support the show.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  This is Alexis Christofres for Bloomberg Surveillance. AI is everywhere, outcomes are not. Not because AI doesn't work, but because AI hasn't reached the workflows yet. The campaigns, the launches, the quarterly planning, those workflows are still run by humans alone. AI is making individuals faster, but it's not making businesses more productive. That's the gap Asana is built to close. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams, your easy button for AI productivity across every team. Ready to go AI teammates, pre-built for marketing, ops and IT. No prompt engineering, no setup. They show up where the work is happening, already on boarded in your workflows, ready to deliver. And the more they work with your team, the smarter they get.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan, towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or 10,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com, that's A-S-A-N-A dot com.

• 42:55Speaker 07

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 43:59Ed Zitron?

  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 gonna lose money because something happened. Because the whims of-

• 44:11Speaker 06

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

• 44:14Ed Zitron?

  Right. Like, all of that sounds horrible to me.

• 44:17Speaker 06

  It's, uh, yeah, it sucks shit sometimes, but what I was gonna say, someone actually left a comment recently, I forgot where, but they said that they bought that Bloom Energy stock when I talked about it. And they're like, "I'm up 300%." "Thanks, Ben. Wow." And I'm like, "Cool, dude. Just enjoy yourself. Remember to pay yourself and not just let it sit there."

• 44:39Ed Zitron?

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

• 44:45Speaker 06

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

• 44:53Speaker 07

  But, and talk about it in, like, entertainment purposes of like, here's how you got law, like, never you should buy this or any of that.

• 45:01Speaker 06

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

• 45:06Ed Zitron?

  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."

• 45:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 45:14Ed Zitron?

  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."

• 45:23Speaker 07

  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, when all those permabulls were calling for a big crash because of all of these, all of these factors, I was like, I believe them. I know that they're idiots, because, but like, I'm, I'm looking at everything going, yeah, how the fuck is everything not just taking a nosedive?

• 46:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. And the answer is, it's a lot of factors.

• 46:06Ed Zitron?

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

• 46:10Speaker 07

  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.

• 46:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a lot of, it's momentum, it's, it's just the, the passive investing and all that cash that just gets forced into the system week after week, day after day. It's a lot of different factors. It's like, it just, it doesn't matter until it suddenly matters. And everybody can collectively on Twitter decide why? And then they give it a couple of 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.

• 47:01Ed Zitron?

  So 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 this?

• 47:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, CPUs are so back. The hottest thing right now.

• 47:11Ed Zitron?

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

• 47:49Speaker 07

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

• 48:18Speaker 06

  Robotics is gonna be the next theme, I think.

• 48:20Ed Zitron?

  You think, you think that's why they go after AI?

• 48:23Speaker 06

  I think that there's, uh, you can, you can, you can put your ear to the ground with.

• 48:27Speaker 07

  Robotics and maybe space and.

• 48:28Speaker 06

  Finance Twitter, robotics, robotics were, was already pretty hot, um, earlier this year and last year. But then it kinda gave way to the memory trade and the bottleneck trade. And now you're gonna be seeing, I think, uh, a return to the robotics trade. Uh, and the physical AI thing. And of course, yeah, you've got, um, you've got the big IPOs coming with fucking SpaceX and, uh.

• 48:54Speaker 07

  He's gonna put a million people on Mars. Don't you understand?

• 48:57Speaker 06

  A million people on Mars. Um.

• 48:58Ed Zitron?

  But the thing is, here's the thing. With that, with the big IPOs, the anthropics, the open AIs, I don't think those two go public. I don't thi- I think that their S1 is gonna 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, 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.

• 49:33Speaker 06

  Now fully absorbed in SpaceX too.

• 49:36Ed Zitron?

  Insane. I'm sorry. I called it XAI. It's SpaceX now. It's SpaceX now.

• 49:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:41Ed Zitron?

  Ah.

• 49:43Speaker 06

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

• 49:50Ed Zitron?

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

• 50:08Speaker 07

  You just keep trading it back and forth, you know.

• 50:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, if I give that money needs to cut people's stocks.

• 50:15Speaker 07

  SpaceX buys Tesla Cybertrucks and it's all just.

• 50:20Ed Zitron?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh. I just mean the stock themselves. Anyway.

• 50:24Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, probably what you'll see ironically, I mean, a lot of, well, a couple of things again.

• 50:33Speaker 06

  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.

• 51:13Speaker 06

  But there is a possibility that money comes out of the other momentum stocks like SanDisk, like Micron, like AMD, et cetera.

• 51:22Ed Zitron?

  So people would dump them.

• 51:23Speaker 06

  It's possible that we might get a rotation like that. Yeah. But real fast, I saw a tweet last night from a guy who has 188,000 followers. I retweeted it. I quote retweeted it because it was too fucking funny. He goes, it was something like, boy, I can't wait until Tesla starts sending Optimus robots into space. It's going to be so good for Tesla. And I'm like, hold on, wait, do you even? And he hosts like a Tesla centric podcast. It's like, my guy, how? Who, who is buying the Optimus robots from Tesla?

• 52:03Speaker 06

  Number one, and then why are they being blasted into space?

• 52:06Ed Zitron?

  So what?

• 52:07Speaker 06

  What they doing out there? That's the equivalent of being like, boy, Tesla's gonna make a bunch of cars and then blast them into space.

• 52:13Speaker 07

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

• 52:16Speaker 06

  Who's paying for that?

• 52:17Speaker 07

  Oh, my God.

• 52:18Speaker 06

  Is Blackstone buying the fucking robots and then going, now send them to Mars? It's gonna be good for Tesla.

• 52:23Speaker 07

  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.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  Which I understand.

• 52:39Speaker 07

  Oh, full.

• 52:40Speaker 06

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

• 52:48Speaker 07

  Oh, I fully would be a psycho.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  I'd be a psycho.

• 52:50Ed Zitron?

  I'd be like, oh, no, I would be, I would, if I'd made like 10 million dollars off of some insane trade I read on Twitter, I would begin to lose my grip on reality.

• 52:59Speaker 07

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

• 53:06Speaker 06

  You don't get it, this whole time, he was making outrageous claims and no one believed him.

• 53:10Speaker 07

  Right.

• 53:10Speaker 06

  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 kinda, I mean, they've done it multiple times, but they're rightfully trying to, starting to call out Kathy Wood in the arc.

• 53:26Ed Zitron?

  Oh, you mean the dumbest, what's her returns like?

• 53:31Speaker 06

  Uh, now, not good.

• 53:33Ed Zitron?

  But yeah, like her whole thing was big in 2021, right?

• 53:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, she was, she, she made one big right call, which was, they famously said, we think Tesla is undervalued. When it was at like, I don't know, 100 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, on their thing and everybody was like, boy, this Kathy Wood lady's really, uh, for, for a lady, she's got a, she's got a good, she's got the, the Midas touch. And then they were also calling for cyber cabs and autonomous stuff.

• 54:11Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Did you hear that that's going to be a $34 trillion industry by 2030?

• 54:16Speaker 06

  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 cybercabs.

• 54:33Speaker 07

  It's only going to cost $30,000.

• 54:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. And get this, Elon's going to blast the cybercabs into space, which is going to be good for Tesla stock. Cause 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 idiot.

• 54:51Ed Zitron?

  I also think that Musk himself, this is an underrated success that Musk has had, though I don't think he did it with intention, in the, the Twitter algorithm

• 55:02Ed Zitron?

  is evil. And like, I looked for that, that AXTI stock. And now I've just got four or five different psychopaths being like, this is the future. This is, I'm going to buy the lasers. The lasers will be the biggest stock I've ever seen. Yum.

• 55:19Speaker 06

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

• 55:35Speaker 07

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

• 55:38Speaker 06

  I think that they've gotten, 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.

• 55:54Speaker 06

  You know, it's, it's frustrating because you'll, you'll see what it's musical chairs. Cause me as a momentum trader, again, I'm like, I don't want to, I'm not here to judge.

• 56:03Ed Zitron?

  What's a momentum trader?

• 56:04Speaker 06

  Sorry. Just just just riding the trend like, okay, if 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, I try to to bring that to my next trades. Okay, what I'm not going to judge. I'm just going to be like, okay, what stocks have momentum, what sectors, what 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.

• 56:51Ed Zitron?

  That's the thing, like, I invest in words.

• 56:54Speaker 06

  What's that?

• 56:55Ed Zitron?

  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, 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.

• 57:20Speaker 06

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

• 57:44Speaker 07

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

• 57:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:47Ed Zitron?

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

• 57:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, it's not good. It's fundamentals are totally out the window. You could make an argument for, well, hey, that's just the new normal now. And, 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 Karp hands.

• 58:22Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Speaker 06

  Fucking.

• 58:24Ed Zitron?

  Now, another great stock.

• 58:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:27Ed Zitron?

  Oh, geez.

• 58:28Speaker 06

  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.

• 58:39Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I, I think the future should be mass censorship. I don't think we should have CNBC able to talk about stocks anymore. I don't think like, just like shut down or like you can't talk about stocks online anymore. 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.

• 59:05Speaker 06

  In 24 seven trading.

• 59:07Ed Zitron?

  24 seven trading plus six month earnings is, that will actually destroy the markets in ways that I'm not sure people could fully conceptualize. Cause 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.

• 59:35Speaker 06

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

• 59:41Ed Zitron?

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

• 59:50Speaker 06

  It is very, I've, I have the same thing. I remember as a kid going to Harris Casino in Loughlin 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, they.

• 1:00:07Speaker 07

  It's gotta be intentional.

• 1:00:08Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 1:00:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Speaker 06

  They've figured it out.

• 1:00:11Speaker 07

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

• 1:00:13Speaker 06

  It just feels good.

• 1:00:14Speaker 07

  They figured out the perfect. Phonic.

• 1:00:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 06

  And I remember loving the bacon that I had at that Hera's Breakfast Buffet.

• 1:00:24Ed Zitron?

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

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:00:39Ed Zitron?

  It's still good. Thank you. I've sucked. I will not hear Vegas line here. All right, fellas, I'm gonna wrap it here. Where can people find you?

• 1:00:49Speaker 06

  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, benandemilshow.com. We do, 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.

• 1:01:12Speaker 07

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

• 1:01:16Speaker 06

  We love taking the piss out of this whole racket.

• 1:01:20Ed Zitron?

  And I do too. Listeners, you'll have a monologue. I apologize that I missed last week. My life has been crazy, but I really appreciate you being patient with me and have enough of a monologue. We'll have some fun guests coming up. Thank you as ever for listening.

• 1:01:41Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:02:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:02:47Speaker 03

  Empower is all about helping you invest well so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  I love a brighter smile. What I don't love is that little wince when I take a sip of something cold or even breathe in cold air. You know that feeling? It takes your breath away, that ouch, eek. That's why I like Sensodyne Clinical White. Its triple-action formula whitens, polishes, and helps protect against sensitivity. Plus, it protects against new stains for up to six months. So I can keep enjoying my iced coffee and everything else I love without the sensitivity. Wider teeth without the wince. Try Sensodyne Clinical White today.

• 1:03:52Ed Zitron?

  Games on a break? Instead of doom-scrolling, try rips on Underdog. Rip real player cards worth real money right there in the app. It's instant cash in the palm of your hand. Buy a digital pack, rip it open on your phone, and reveal a real, physical card. Football, basketball, Pokemon, yes, Pokemon, and more. The best part? Packs start at just $5. And if you pull something you don't want to let go of just yet, have it shipped straight to your door. Want the cash? Sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair market value. No listing, no negotiating, no stranger asking if you'll trade it for a used jet ski, even though jet skis are super sick. Best part? There are some serious grails in the mix, with maximum card values reaching up to $125,000

• 1:04:36Ed Zitron?

  depending on your pack tier. You can also check the live odds and see what you could pull before you rip, and what other... Other cards are being pulled by fans. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18 plus. Terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  With LPL Financial, we provide the services to help push you forward. When it comes to your finances, your business, your future, the only question should be, what if you could?

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  Pit advertisement. Anna Kendrick is not a client of LPL Financial LLC and receives compensation to promote LPL. Investing involves risk, including potential loss. Principal LPL Financial, LLC, member FINRA, SIPC. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.