The Insanity of the Markets with Ben & Emil

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Oh yeah. I can't draw one of those. We spent $100,000 on this studio and it's just a money pit we keep throwing money at. Much like people keep throwing money at these memory stocks. Am I right? Jeez Louise, these Koreans. A little loop back there. No, this whole conversation started though with you and me, Ben, talking about how finance Twitter is this new insane thing. And I'm relatively new to it. I feel like you douse yourself in it fairly often. But my process when I go on and read finance Twitter now is just seeing how many people are going insane in a particular day and what they're going insane about. And it's usually an Axios article about oil. Yeah, oil these days, it doesn't matter anymore. I mean, I'm really, really dialed in on finance Twitter and I have been for a long time. And it's become a really, really fascinating place. I was just ruminating on this last night because it used to be, sorry, here comes a rant. It used to be disjointed, right? It used to be when I first was coming up in trading in 2009 and all the way through like 2015, there was finance Twitter, sure, but you still had Yahoo finance message boards. You had, there was Investors Hub was another one, but that was mostly for penny stocks. There are a bunch of other little ones, but now Twitter is the single, it's a hive mind. And 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. And depending on who you ask, oh, it's priced in. The market is forward looking. And that's, is it a function of people just looking for a story afterward to excuse and explain the fact that the market doesn't care anymore? I don't know. but yeah, it just doesn't seem to care. Yeah, Brent crude is at like, last I checked, like 110 a barrel and a month ago that would have spelled disaster for the S&P but now it just doesn't, it doesn't matter anymore because now the narrative has shifted. Everybody's focused on memory stocks and semiconductors, the SOX, the semiconductor ETF has just been on a parabolic run. And that's just a group of different, For the audience, that's just a group of semiconductor stocks that you can buy in the group. Yes. Effectively. Right. And I recently learned over the last 48 hours, have you seen Korea's stock market index? The Kospi? Oh, the Kospi? The Kospi show? Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Dude. This thing is, it's gone parabolic. And it's kind of, there was a big thing about Korean traders last year, I believe, when everybody was chasing quantum stocks and nuclear names. People started to learn and figure out that a lot of it was from Korean retail traders just chasing American stocks because it was very liquid. Yeah. And I think what we're seeing right now is the same thing because someone posted that like the top five stocks and ETFs owned by Korean retail, number one is I believe Sandisk. Number two is the 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, I want to short some Sandisk because it's gone up 2000% in the last six months. it just keeps going up every day. So how indicative of the wider world is tech Twitter? Is it a tech investment Twitter? Is it actually like, is it a fair valuation of the market? Is it something else? Like, is it just this weird side? Because it seems like it's somewhat indicative, but also if you followed investment based on what Twitter said, you would lose all your money. Yeah. Yeah. I think that it is. It's also weird that it's broken containment where like you were talking about how it was siloed off and all those strange places, but now it's with the new algorithm. It's like everyone is getting these things on Twitter. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I don't know if you should. It depends who you want to listen to. I mean, I'm sure you see, we talk a lot about the like fear mongering and the guys who are just the perma bowl. Perma bear. Sorry, perma bear. and I mean, even this week, it's like they'll also way zoom in on the S&P 500 chart and be like, 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 Iran agreement or something. Yeah, I think. Which does not exist. Like it's just Axios. It's just Axios. It's just Axios saying, yep. Yeah, the key thing here, I think, is that I'm trying to remember as a trader is there's an old idiom or axiom, whatever you want to, whatever the word is. The trend is your friend. And currently the trend is momentum. And everybody's got their marching orders from like institutions and hedge funds on down to retail traders, which is while the getting's good, you better eat because you can stand on the sidelines and scratch your head and wonder why it's going up. Or you can, it's like that, it's like that meme of the bell chart, you know, with the, with the really smart guy and the idiot and then the kind of middle ground. And it's like, no, the stocks are, the stocks are overvalued. No. That's exactly right. And I have been that middle guy way too many times to count. And I'm trying to be the guy with the Wojak, with the hood being like, just buy, just buy them, you know? And it's so hard. You said to me, it's like the best way to trade is just assume what would piss you off the most will happen. Yes, that's exactly right. Whatever move, I've told Emil this too, and our audience is like, especially on the macro side, on just like the S&P, whatever move will piss you off, will piss me off the most, tends to be the one that I'm essentially calling it what other people refer to as the pain trade, meaning whatever is the most painful move for the most market participants tends to be the one that occurs and follows through. And when you've got like the, I don't know why I'm gesturing because nobody can see me, but when you've got like a sharp decline like we had a few weeks back, I believe now like six weeks ago, when you've got a sharp decline like that and then a nice tradable bottom occurs on a lot of volume, meaning it's like a lot of people are coming in and there's some capitulation going. Once that bottom is in, everybody who missed shorting is now going, oh, now's my time to get short. But then when it just keeps going higher, you're pulling out your hair because now you're stuck short and it's still going higher and you're missing out on that upside. So it's a double-edged sword of just like, fuck, I wanted to participate in that downside that I missed. And now that I'm getting into it, I'm missing all this upside. That's been me multiple times. And then when it goes on week two of bouncing, which it did, you go, okay, surely now it's probably going to pull back again. But then when it doesn't, you're on week three. We are currently on six weeks straight up. So now I believe the move that will piss off the most people, including myself, is just sideways and up for the remainder of the summer. I think that the longer, basically, the higher we go, the higher we go, is a very simple, simplistic way of putting it. And it feels like it's setting everyone up for disaster, though, when the bottom falls out. Because there's actually, when you look at the actual numbers, as I do obsessively, It doesn't look good, but then there's the smugness of, well, if it was so bad, why number go up? And it's, everything's disconnected. I guess it kind of feels foolish to say this as if it's new, but it feels like everything is disconnected from reality at this point. Like every single part of it. It's a very strange feeling because, so most of my money is just in index funds and stuff because I can't get into this whole game. And Bogle head over here. I mean, I am, I am fully in cash. I truly am. I don't, I don't touch anything. 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. Yeah. So there was someone from the administration today who... Kevin Hassett, who was like... The consumer is strong. Credit card spending is through the roof. And sure, that's because they're spending more on gas, but it's also because they just love buying shit right now. And it's like, dude, I do not think you have your finger on the pulse. I love buying shit. But I think that that, I mean, that is certainly true. It is easier than ever to buy things and not feel necessarily like you're actually buying anything. Because I don't know about you guys, but man, it is just, it doesn't feel like I'm buying anything when I have to double tap on the phone. Yep. It's just like, oh yeah, this isn't money. Even if you don't have the money, you can clarner yourself, silly. Yes. Still don't know how those companies could possibly survive, but whatever. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Nothing really matters. Nothing really matters. And I think there's just so much money out there on the sidelines. 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. People like me who just, when it goes down, buy the dip because I'm like, great, I love a little discount. Why not? Yeah. In the hopes that it doesn't go down further. This is why I never touch the markets. I almost feel like the way the markets function now is about as anti-consumer an investor as it could get. Because it's not like regular people have access to any of the signals they'd need to actually... Well, I guess now everyone's doing insider trading, it doesn't really matter. But it feels like following one's nose or like actually understanding fundamentals doesn't really matter. Like you've got enough deals that are just completely fake with AMD and Broadcom and all that. I'm very much focusing on tech stocks. The market isn't reacting to reality if it ever did. And I'm trying to work out whether this is a remarkable era or just one of many pants shittings for the market. Yeah. I mean, dude, what we're all describing basically is another old phrase that bull markets climb a wall of worry. And it's like the worry is, can this be sustained? Is this real? and surely throughout the way up, there are companies that are going to have poor earnings or suspend dividends or have their CapEx suddenly skyrocket or whatever. And those companies definitely will get hit. But the way that things are going currently with the way things are trending, everybody just kind of shifts their focus on its rotation from sector to sector And right now the big thing is AI bottlenecks And there this person who blew up recently on Twitter They an anonymous account They called Serenity something. But this guy, do you know who I'm talking about? No, I'm going to look him up as we're speaking. Serenity, this guy started talking about this company. The ticker symbol is A-X-T-I. and I'm so pissed because I saw this tweet and I saw people talking about it and it's like oh they have the market cornered on some fucking substrate just some shit that I have no idea I don't understand it and they're like this company is so pivotal to the entire supply chain and the market cap at the time was like 800 million dollars and my stupid ass was trying to apply logic to it. And I'm like, okay, if they're that crucial and they're only valued at $800 million, why doesn't some other bigger company just come acquire them? And boom, now you own that part of the supply chain. So I was like, this is too good to be true. It's one of those things where, you know, it probably is just getting a pump and it'll just flounder. And it has gone 10x since then. It is now trading at like 70. This company has $23 million of quarterly revenue. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. But then you have companies like this POET, ticker symbol POET, where everybody thought that this was going to be the next one because they've got some kind of, I don't know, proprietary IP that was going to, they were starting to get contracts or something. And then just like a week ago, the stock collapsed 40%. Ben, I'm sorry. This actually does remind me of something very specific. Cryptocurrency. This is just crypto. It's the same fucking shit. Because I didn't invest in it, but I aggressively followed the Twitter campaigns. And it would be like, this one is going to be the infrastructure company for Web3 for this. And this one is going to speed up Web3. You need to buy this token because it's going to 10x. It's the same, except it's now the stock market. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because we haven't even really touched on that aspect of this particular market, which is that now with it being easier than ever for people to just download 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 over. And those are the people who were speculating on AMC cinema stock, right? Exactly. And, you know, but this has been going on for years. You guys just don't understand. I thought this all dissipated. And we made some like offhand comments about how crazy the AMC thing is. And for about a week, our mentions were just like, fuck you, you don't understand. AMC is the way. And so there are these narratives of people who should have never gotten involved in these stocks, who have gotten wrapped up, have convinced themselves just, well, one day it's finally going to hit and I'm going to be able to, I'm going to be able to get myself out of this hole. It's just absolutely insane. Not only that, but a lot of these, the crypto thing is huge because as we all know now, not crypto itself is dead but definitely the altcoin market that everybody is playing it's over there all of those people you guys are saying my fartcoin is not coming back fartcoin is fucking dead god fucking damn it god fucking damn it fartcoin is pretty much my entire portfolio that and cash brother I owned some which is really pathetic hell yeah dude you're a guy who invests in anything You want to find the upside where you can. Yeah, I got to seek that alpha. What does alpha mean? Alpha means your edge. You're looking for any kind of edge, be it a technical thing or a fundamental thing. You find a diamond in the rough. But a lot of these crypto guys have now fully embraced trading the AI bottleneck stuff. And now what a lot of them are doing is downloading, not Robinhood, but Interactive Brokers is another popular retail trading platform. And they just enabled it so that you can easily trade Korean stocks. So now all these dudes, they're all looking at Korean names that don't have ticker symbols. They have numbers. So it's like 5066 or whatever the hell. And they're just these companies that 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 there was one SoyTech or something. It went from like, it's very illiquid too. And it went from like $30 a share just a month ago. And now it's at 190. like this is just this is oh my god it's literally the crypto fuck it's fucking it's the same thing yeah run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iheart's twice as large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844- iHeart to get started. That's 844- 844- iHeart. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy? Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Who's the worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me? Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation? To the group? The Yardbirds, right? That's the name? The Harvard Yardbirds. They're open to cheap. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, One erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Last night, a blown call changed the game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight reel. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow TimboSliceLife12 and the TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what y'all say. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor IV. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week, I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment. And the next, we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast. It's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told and for people who are chasing something bigger so if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream this is right where you need to be listen to the clifford show on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast and for more behind the scenes follow at clifford and at tiktok podcast network on tiktok yeah and it feels like everybody's getting rich except for me i also think it's tapping into a certain mindset of people right now that makes all this possible where it's like, it was very apparent with the crypto thing where it's like, no one, there are very few good jobs available anymore. It's so hard to start a business without just getting absolutely hosed. And you have all these, I mean, it's a lot of men who want a way to make money and they're like, okay, well, I'm smart. I can, I can, 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. 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. Yeah, Slogan Dorfenberg. Slogan Dorfenberg. He was just a guy, just a normal guy who turned, I'm not exaggerating, $5,000 into to $100 million over the course of 2020 to 2023. And his high watermark was 100 million, but then he gave back like 60 of it and it dropped down to like, I don't know, 35, 40. And yeah, he just talks about how he was playing the trends and just, I mean, there's a, guys like that have, are blessed because they don't have the experience necessary to be cautious. So they just throw that caution to the wind and they're like, this is the thing that everybody's buying. Whereas I would go, it's already run up like 500%. He's like, hot diggity, it's up 500%. I got to get in on that. And then it goes up another thousand percent. 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 jump off a boat. What you're describing is walking around a casino and being like, why am I not making money? Everyone's cheering. Yeah. If this is so scary, do you know how much of the stock market is made up of retail investors, regular people now? I don't know, but I know it's a substantial amount. It's too much. I know that's- It's substantial enough that it legitimately moves markets now. That's so bad. Yeah. Well, it used to be a lot worse because it was all focused on, it was all fragmented and it was all focused on penny stocks and people just going like, oh, you know, the one I like to talk about the most, the most famous one arguably was sponge tech. And 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 went from like 10 cents to $10 or something like that. But nowadays, retail is, and I put this in quotes, smarter, only in the sense that it's a lot more coordinated and organized and people can share information a lot easier and cleaner. Which almost has like a negative impact though. Yeah, like being able to share information doesn't mean the information is useful or good. Right. And if you're the last one holding the bag, you're not going to have a good time and you're going to end up like one of these AMC guys. Right. And they end up starting subreddits and they all make themselves insane. And even when it's just completely dead, you have three guys in there just posting a news article being like, could be good for us. I'm going to be honest. I do this with, are you familiar with Nebius? Yeah. Nebius, they're an AI NeoCloud compute thing. Reading Nebius, the stockholders there, and just reading like, what would it take Nebius to get to $2,000 a share? It's like 180 right now. It's like, congratulations to everyone. Like, it isn't about PT or AI bubble anymore. It's more than that. And it's just a screenshot of an all caps tweet about Larry Fink saying, I actually believe a new asset class will be buying futures of compute. Oh yeah, I saw that. what does that mean what do you mean a fucking commodities of fucking compute what are you talking about it sounds a lot like Enron in the early 2000s 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 I remember I don't remember when it happened but I remember yeah I've watched the smartest guys in the room three or four times now and they literally were trying to move into weather trading which rules in their commercials what was their slogan? it was like, why not? I think that was their slogan why not? I just watched the other guys last night and there's the massive fraudster played by Steve Coogan in there and they won't say what they do we're in everything but what? I just feel like at this point, this market is the most griftable in the world. Oh, I mean, Trump himself, the whole thing's a casino. Other oil shorting? Yeah, I mean, truly, the leader of the country is the biggest grifter. It's every Friday and Monday, he's doing his little narrative truths to manipulate the market. I just, I get at some point, this has to go poorly. I mean, it's probably already getting poorly, going poorly with the amount of fucking money going into these random stocks, but it just feels like it's setting everyone up at once to get fucked again and again and again. A couple of things. Go. I remember the most frustrated I was, just piggybacking off the nebulous shareholders, there was a similar kind of fanfare all around quantum computing stocks last year. And I, my enterprising dumbass fought the trend and got short some of them a little, just a couple weeks too early, right before the final blow off top. And I was getting, I was just getting. Sitting around the fucking. Oh man, I was getting. Coming up with slurs for quantum computers. Oh man, oh yeah, I was getting, I was turning racist. I was getting all kinds of anger because I was just getting my ass blown out. Which was very funny. I mean, we're looking at these companies. Probably not for that. Million dollar market caps. This company sold one computer in 2025 or something, and it's just blasting off. It booked like $6 million in revenues for the whole year, and the market cap was like $25 billion. And they're like, see, guys? Quantum is the future. I think we're going to the mood with this one. But then they eventually petered out and have dropped considerably. But now it's funny because now all of the energy guys, the nuclear energy guys are trying to rally the energy sector Nice And they all tweeting like they trying to force the meme essentially of being like I seen that fail in crypto so many times Yeah. But to answer your... The other thing, to answer your question of what's going to happen, how's this going to end, people are going to get hurt. I think what could be the catalyst is... And this goes back to Twitter being the hive mind. And when we talk about looking for catalysts and reasons, I think the narrative is going to start going toward Koreans again, and Korea, and these retail traders over there that are just going nuts. I saw a translated Korean tweet the other day from someone over there who said, you guys don't understand, it's gotten so insane over here. The old lady who's checking you out. I saw the grandma tweet earlier. is looking at stock charts. So I think that if and when we see- That's exactly what happened with Enron. Yeah, I think- It's the same thing. 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 higher held names that Korean, the number one retail ones like Soxel and Sandisk and all that stuff. But yeah, there's nothing quite like that pain of just going, of thinking, why the fuck didn't I just buy and chase and ride the trend? I could be sitting on hundreds of thousands, if not maybe a couple million dollars from a modest position if I just... and they just, just when you think, I can't chase it, it's at $800 a share. I can't chase it. Then it's at a thousand. Then it's at 1100. Then it's at 1400. I think today it hit $1,500 a share. This is fucking Christ. And Micron is just, they're just going parabolic and somewhere there's some kid in Korea just What's he doing? Slurping on bibimbap and I'm going, I'm going. Is that what it is? Bulgogi? and he's going like hot damn i i can you know take my take my girlfriend out or boyfriend you know it was a it's a we live it we live in the 21st century we're progressive and i'm over here just going god damn that korean guy out there on the other side of this trade because i am short a little bit of socks and smh but and you like bibimbap i love bibimbap i can't can't Wouldn't that be beautiful if the Korean boy makes his money on the long side and then I, his American counterparty, makes money on the short side? Let's just hope he gets out in time and it all works out for you. That's exactly right. And I hope the Korean grocery vegetable lady out there, God, I hope she brings the register. That's who I hope is really ringing the register. Yeah. But it's the modern day shoe shiner. It's the Korean vegetable lady. It's just such a bad... In the past, I said I bought some S&P 500 and people got mad at me. And it was like, I did it once as a bid for a guest that I just joked about it with. I live in cash for many reasons that I won't go into. It's mostly to do with just how I grew up. 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, the best thing to do is nothing if you're scared. And I actually think it's a good rule in general. It just doesn't, it feels like the internet has made everything worse. You said it is better. I don't know if I agree. Like, when I first got to America in 2008, I remember there were like investor newsletters. There were like 70 of them. Oh, yeah. That was a big one, too. Some crusty old man would send you his thoughts every week, and you'd pay him $1,500 a month for some reason. And I assume you did well. 2008 wasn't really a great year for stocks for some reason. And now it's just however many anonymous or pseudonymous insane people you follow and which one of them successfully cons enough people into being insane too. Yeah. And they used to have a strategy back then where they would say you had a thousand subscribers to your newsletter. You would send one pick to a hundred people, one to another hundred people, one and you would divvy them up. And then the people who got the losers were obviously like, well, fuck this guy. The people who got the winners were like, damn, this guy's awesome. And I'm butchering this, but basically they would keep focusing on their winner subscribers and build their trust and build their rapport with that group. And they just kind of repeated that multiple times until they had 5,000 people who just trust them and will blindly follow them into any... I was one of those people. I remember... God damn it, man. I forgot the name of it. it was some stupid name. I don't know, but I remember the name of the company, SYNCOR, and the ticker symbol was SYNC. And I bought it in like 2010 because they had had some previous winners that went up like 2000%. And I thought, man, I slept on that last one. I slept on the one before because I didn't trust this group, but they seem to be the hot group right now. Wouldn't you know it? When I bought the one that they suggested, the next one, that was when their hot streak came to a grinding halt. And I remember being, I bought this thing right before earnings with all of my money that I had in my trading account, which was like 18 grand or something. And the stock got cut in half immediately after earnings. And I was like, I was at my, I've told this story on the show where I was at my job that I hated, like despised. I'd worked there for nine months and I saw, oh, basically just like nine months of my entire job here has just been erased. I've essentially been working for free. And I went and I sat in the bathroom and I just sat there and I took out my phone and I took out the calculator and I did the math on, I included gas because I had to commute every day and taxes. And I was like, it's going to take me, I don't know, eight months just to make back what I just lost on that one trade. I fucking, and there was no air conditioning in the building and it was always like 85 degrees in there every day. And I had a coworker who had a chronic throat clearing thing. So I just go back to my desk and this guy's just going, like every 10 seconds. Oh, brother. I would become a serial killer. Oh, I was like, you didn't have it back then, but I wanted to become the Joker. I mean that's what you're joking but that's what's so scary you did have the joker back then not like that the meme had yet to be created but that's what's so scary we're joking but there's now basically like hundreds of thousands of these people strewn across society just getting hosed on stocks losing their hard earned money or in some cases making some in some cases There was someone... Becoming insane. There was a stock that I talked about on our show. It was called Bloom. It is called Bloom Energy. The ticker symbol is B-E. And Ed, I famously owned this in the teens. And I sold it. And it's now... Jesus Christ, man. Yeah. You see that chart? It's up to like $280 a share. Well, what I also see is the receipt I have for how much Oracle is paying them. and oh yeah if Oracle announced thing oh no I'm looking at the actual receipt oh shit internal Oracle and let me tell you something it's only for Stargate Abilene so I mean long term you'll be right but that's the thing none of this matters yeah like things being bad now doesn't matter as long as the insane people have led it this all sounds like Enron plus crypto it's terrifying to me We'll be right back. broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy? Not quite. On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guests, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Who's the worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me? Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation? To the group? To the group. The Yardbirds, right? That's the name? The Harvard Yardbirds. But they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One Erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Last night, a blown call changed the game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. Highlights are trending, opinions are flying, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo. Every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the plays, the controversies, and the stories behind the headlines. We go straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions, the stuff nobody gets to hear. The laughs, the drama, the triumphs, the moments that never make the highlight reel. From viral moments to historic games, from buzzer beaters to controversial calls, we break it down, give you context, and ask the questions everybody wants answered. Sports Slice brings you closer to the action with stories told by the people who live them. Listen to Sports Slice on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow TimboSliceLife12 and the TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. A win is a win. A win is a win. I don't care what y'all say. Yep, that's me, Clifford Taylor IV. You might have seen the skits, the reactions, my journey from basketball to college football, or my career in sports media. Well, somewhere along the way, this platform became bigger than I ever imagined. And now I'm bringing all of that excitement to my brand new podcast, The Clifford Show. This is a place for raw, unfiltered conversations with some of your favorite athletes, creators, and voices that not only deserve to be heard, but celebrated. One week, I'll take you behind the scenes of the biggest moments in sports and entertainment. And the next, we'll talk about life, mental health, purpose, and even music. The Clifford Show isn't just a podcast. It's a space for honest conversations, stories that don't always get told and for people who are chasing something bigger so if you've ever supported me or you're just chasing down a dream this is right where you need to be listen to the clifford show on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast and for more behind the scenes follow at clifford and at tiktok podcast network on tiktok 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. If I was like, I'm going to lose money because something happened. Or I'm not going to make money because I sold it too soon. Right. All of that sounds horrible to me. Yeah, it sucks shit sometimes. But what I was going to say, someone actually left a comment recently. I forgot where, but they said that they bought that Bloom Energy stock when I talked about it. And they were like, I'm up 300%. Thanks, Ben. And I'm like, cool, dude. Just enjoy yourself. Remember to pay yourself and not just let it sit there. Do your listeners get mad at you? Do you give stock advice? I know you talk about your own trading. I talk about my own trades, but I have been sure to remind people that none of this... I mean, people know by now. And talk about it in entertainment purposes of like, here's how I got lost. Never you should buy this or any of that. Yeah. I have said, like, I really like this for the following reasons kind of thing. Yeah. I get people who email me and message me all the time being like, how do I short this? How do I short this? And I always say, I don't know. Yeah. Like, I just like, I don't know. I don't give financial advice. I can't tell you how to do it. Put cash in a box under your bed. I mean, but that's the thing. You know, if it was that easy, everyone would be millionaires. I think as we've been talking about this entire time, the irrationality of all of it is like impossible to account for. Someone like Ben has a lot of experience with it. So he has a better shot. But like, you know, I was telling Ben when, when all those permaboles 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. Cause, but like idiots, I'm, I'm looking at everything going, yeah, how the fuck is everything not just taking a nosedive? Yeah. And it's a lot of factors. It feels like the market doesn't want it to. Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. I think they're going to do anything they can to keep the ownership class satisfied and keep the market propped up for them and continuing to grow. Yeah, it's a lot of momentum. It's just the passive investing and all that cash that just gets forced into the system week after week, day after day. It's a lot of different factors. It doesn't matter until it suddenly matters. And everybody can collectively on Twitter decide why. And then they give it a couple weeks and they've now processed it. And now it's like, well, now we've, whew. What used to take months to process information and to process catalysts now takes weeks, if not days, if not hours sometimes. The thing I've been enjoying right now is everyone's talking about CPUs instead of GPUs. You heard this? Yeah, CPUs are so back. They're the hottest thing right now. 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 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. You're bringing too much logic into this. That's the problem. You're thinking too rationally about it. And yeah, I think it's all going to get absorbed and pivot. If the whole AI thing goes bust, I don't think we're even going to see this bubble bursting that everyone's expecting. Everyone's just going to start being like, robotics, robotics is what it all is now. And we're all heavily invested in that. The future's that. and we're all just going to keep going up. Robotics is going to be the next theme, I think. You think that's why they go off to right eye? I think that you can put your ear to the ground Robotics and maybe space With finance Twitter robotics Robotics was already pretty hot earlier this year and last year But then it kind of gave way to the memory trade and the bottleneck trade. And now you're going to be seeing, I think, a return to the robotics trade. Nice. And the physical AI thing. And of course, yeah, you've got the big IPOs coming with fucking SpaceX and... He's going to put a million people on Mars, don't you understand? He's going to put a million people on Mars. But the thing is, here's the thing. With that, with the big IPOs, the Anthropics, the Open AIs, I don't think those two go public. I think that their S1's going to look like a dog's dinner on Thanksgiving and then his arsehole on the other way. Because it's... The thing is, even in an illogical market, Yep. We've yet to see a big IPO showing its dirty business. We've yet to see somebody really showing how bad things are. You'll notice the XAI's IPO, they've hidden that documentation from the world. Like they don't want- It's now fully absorbed in SpaceX too. Insane. It's so insane. I called it XAI. It's SpaceX now. It's SpaceX now. Yeah. $250 billion value. It's just like you're borrowing from Peter to pay Elon. You're Borrowing from Elon to pay Elon. But also the other thing is, is 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? You just keep trading back and forth, you know. That money needs to cut people's stocks. SpaceX buys Tesla Cybertrucks and it's all just... Oh, oh, oh, oh. I just mean the stock themselves. Anyway. Yeah. Well, probably what you'll see, ironically, I mean, a lot of... Well, a couple of things. Again, a lot of people start to talk about, oh, the Anthropic or the SpaceX or the whatever IPO is going to mark the top of the market. But then when you put that out there as a narrative, the more and more you put it out there, the more and more people think the same thing. But then when everybody's thinking that same thing, it ain't going to fucking happen because it pisses me off that it wouldn't happen. So actually, it's like it's the fucking Princess Bride poison goblet scene. It's just, well, actually, a smart man would think that the market would go down, but the wise man would know that the smart man thinks that it would go down, so actually it would not. But there is a possibility that money comes out of the other momentum stocks like SanDisk, like Micron, like AMD, etc. So people would dump them. It's possible that we might get a rotation like that, yeah. But real fast, I saw a tweet last night from a guy who has 188,000 followers. I retweeted it. I quote retweeted it because it was too fucking funny. He goes, it was something like, boy, I can't wait until Tesla starts sending Optimus robots into space. It's going to be so good for Tesla. And I'm like, hold on. Wait, do you even... And he hosts like a Tesla-centric podcast. it's like my guy how who is buying the Optimus robots from Tesla number one and then why are they being blasted into space what are they doing out there that's the equivalent of being like boy Tesla's gonna make a bunch of cars and then blast them into space build our little Mars civilization but who's paying for that is Blackstone buying the fucking robots and then going now send them to Mars it's gonna be good for Tesla But this is, you know, we talk about this all the time too. There's a bunch of people who have, the people who have hit on these things then develop their own psychosis where like you have these Tesla people who have made a lot of money and now cannot see what's really happening. Which I understand. Oh, full. Because if I was a guy, I am, but if I was a guy who made, some of these retail guys truly have made 10, $20 million. Oh, I fully would be a psycho. I'd be a psycho. I'd be like, oh, no, I would be. If I'd made like $10 million off of some insane trade I read on Twitter, I would begin to lose my grip on reality. And I'd think that the CEO was omniscient and I would follow him to the ends of the earth. You don't get it. This whole time he was making outrageous claims and no one believed him. But the market eventually caught up and he's doing the same thing now. And you just don't get it, do you? I love that people are finally kind of, I mean, they've done it multiple times, but they're rightfully starting to call out Cathie Wood in the arc. Oh, you mean the dumbest? What's her returns like? Now, not good. But yeah, like her whole thing was betting in 2021, right? Yeah, she made one big right call, which was they famously said, we think Tesla is undervalued when it was at like, I don't know, a hundred billion, 90 billion market cap or something like that. And that was right before it skyrocketed straight to a trillion. So they made well over 10 X on their, on their thing. And everybody was like, boy, this Kathy Wood ladies really, uh, for, for a lady, she's got a, she's got a good, she's got the, the Midas touch. And then, um, they were also calling for cyber cabs and autonomous stuff. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Did you hear that that's going to be a $34 trillion industry by 2030? 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 cyber cabs and Optimus robots are going to be building the cyber cabs. And they're only going to cost $30,000. Yeah, and get this, Elon's going to blast the cyber cabs into space, which is going to be good for Tesla stock. Because they're going to be building all those cars, which is going to be revenue for them. and then they send them into space on spacex rockets which is good revenue for spacex you fucking i also think that musk himself this is an underrated success that musk has had though i don't think he did it with intention in the the twitter algorithm is evil and like i looked for that that a 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. Yeah. Yeah. Once you click one cash tag, as they call them, you are then inundated with all kinds of pumping tweets. But... Why? Yeah, it's frustrating. How much of that do you think is bots and how much do you think it is organic? I think that they've gotten... Oh, I'm sure. They've gotten decent at the bots. It used to be when you click a cash tag of any kind, you would just get spam posts for Discord rooms. But I think that they've started to clamp down on that. It's frustrating because you'll see what... It's musical chairs. Because me as a momentum trader, again, I'm like, I don't want to... I'm not here to judge a momentum trader. Sorry. Just riding the trend. Like, okay, if a correct thing of me to have done, but I didn't do would have been to recognize that momentum is currently focused on memory stocks and just buy the dips on those and get out. Buy the dips, get out. And so I try to bring that to my next trades. Okay, I'm not going to judge. I'm just going to be like, okay, what stocks have momentum? What sectors, whatever has momentum, I'm just going to try to get in and get out. but just my luck. Sometimes you buy the one that just doesn't fucking work. And that's scary enough to keep me from getting on that train. It's just a fucking never ending thing. I mean, she just want to fucking die. That's the thing. I invest in words. What's that? I invest in words and no one can see what I'm doing, like a DreamWorks style thing, but my face isn't doing it anymore. It's just, I, 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 it's based. Software, 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. Yeah, but I think Ed is talking about broadly the entire market, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The experience of we have a market that is somewhat dictated by Twitter psychopaths is really bad. Yeah. It's not good. Fundamentals are totally out the window. You could make an argument for, well, hey, that's just the new normal now. And you kind of have to throw caution out the window if you want to try to make money at it, which is not a reassuring thing and it's not a good thing. It just is what it is. I'm doing the Alex Karp hands. Yeah. fucking now another great stock yeah oh geez i remember following that at five bucks and people were like you don't understand and i just was like i don't know fuck i don't even understand what this company does palantir get the fuck out of here fucking god yeah i i think the future should be mass censorship i don't think we should have cnbc able to talk about stocks anymore or I don't think, just like shut down, or you can't talk about stocks online anymore. No, I don't think there's any fixing this other than massive amounts of pain. And the fact they want to move to semi-annual earnings is fucking bonkers. That is the craziest move in the world. In 24-7 trading. 24-7 trading plus six-month earnings, that will actually destroy the markets in ways that I'm not sure people could fully conceptualize. because it would just be like everything will be casino now. Except no, that's an insult to my beautiful slot machines, which are fair and have real odds, unlike these scurrilous markets run by pigs and vagabonds. And at least with the slot machines, you have those fun sounds that are stimulating. I will fully admit there have been times when I've been very anxious in my life where I've just listened to casino sounds. I find them very relaxing. It is very... I have the same thing. I remember as a kid going to Harris Casino in Laughlin with my family for vacation and walking through that casino floor, I was like, this sounds so nice and good, but I don't know why. It's just so pleasing. The ding, ding, ding. It's got to be intentional. Of course. They've figured it out. They're pumping in oxygen, so you're feeling good. It just feels good to hear. They've figured out the perfect... phonic yeah yeah and i i remember uh loving the the bacon that i had at that harrah's uh breakfast buffet oh the buffets the buffets in in casinos are just fucking amazing it's like hey you might kill yourself because you just lost everything but the least we could do is give you some really top shelf bacon that was back then i don't know if it's any good now but it's still good thank you i've i've sucked i will not hear vegas land here all right fellas i'm gonna wrap it here where can people find you ben and emil show if you just google the ben and emil show you go on youtube you go on spotify apple podcasts instagram twitter um you know ben ben and emil show.com we do we do our weekly show and then we also do some fun stuff like uh where we famously took acid and went to the mall or we took acid and went to a train festival you'll find it all at our youtube page and instagram stuff it's all there we love taking the piss out of the this whole this whole uh racket and uh i do too listeners you'll have a monologue i apologize that i missed last week my life has been crazy but i really appreciate you being patient with me and have another monologue have some fun guests coming up thank you as ever for listening Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be right back. help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Last night, a blown call changed the game. This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to Sports Slice on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more, follow Timbo Slice Life 12 and the TikTok Podcast Network on TikTok. Life is full of hurdles, so how do you keep going? On Hurdle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring woman in sports and wellness, from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurdle with Emily Abadi on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal, but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth. Listen to Superhuman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.