LIVE: U.S. Attacks Iran, AI Surveillance Clash & Tech Layoffs – Monitoring The Situation

All right. All right. Well, things are heating up. We've got a situation that we are going to monitor for just a little bit here. Obviously, we have Iran uh being attacked by the United States and Israel and Iran also retaliating uh across the entire Gulf region. And this is uh escalating very quickly. So we are looking to keep an eye on exactly what's happening. I'm going to give you guys an update on that. I had a completely different plan prepared for today. We're going to talk about the AI situation which we will definitely dive into a little bit as well. But um yep, welcome in everybody. It's time to dive into what just happened. So, uh, first thing I'll do is I'll play this, um, this clip from Trump talking about exactly what is going on here and, uh, what happened. So, we'll we'll let that play and then let everyone come into the room. If you've already seen it, just stick around. We're going to break down what this means for markets. We're going to talk about, uh, what's happening over, how can we even pay attention and keep up with anything. All the markets are closed, yet there are ways that we can keep an eye on what may come next. So, we're going to talk about that as well. So, stick around. Let's watch this quick video here real quick and see exactly what Trump has said and then we'll talk about what other leaders are doing, how they're reacting, and uh what may come next for this situation. So, this is uh the statement that Trump made last night. I'm going to let you guys come into the room and watch this. Uh if you haven't seen it, come through. If you have and you're in replay, then you can skip through. But here we are. A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating eminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people. Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world. For 47 years, the Iranian regime has chanted death to America and waged an unending campaign of bloodshed and mass murder, targeting the United States, our troops, and the innocent people in many, many countries. Among the regime's very first acts was to back a violent takeover of the US embassy in Tran, holding dozens of American hostages for 444 days. In 1983, Iran's proxies carried out the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel. In 2000, they knew and were probably involved with the attack on the USS Cole. Many died. Iranian forces killed and maimed hundreds of American service members in Iraq. The regime's proxies have continued to launch countless attacks against American forces stationed in the Middle East in recent years, as well as US naval and commercial vessels in international shipping lands. It's been mass terror and we're not going to put up with it any longer. From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained, and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts. And it was Iran's proxy Hamas that launched the monstrous October 7th attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage. It was brutal, something like the world has never seen before. Iran is the world's number one state sponsor of terror and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested. It has always been the policy of the United States in particular my administration that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon. I'll say it again. They can never have a nuclear weapon. That is why in operation midnight hammer last June we obliterated the regime's nuclear program at Fordo Natans and Isvahan. After that attack we warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it again. They wanted to do it. They didn't want to do it. They didn't know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil. But Iran refused, just as it has for decades and decades. They've rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can't take it anymore. Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas and could soon reach the American homeland. Just imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had and actually were armed with nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message. For these reasons, the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We are going to destroy their missiles and raise their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally again obliterated. We are going to annihilate their navy. We are going to ensure that the region's terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces and no longer use their IEDs or roadside bombs as they are sometimes called to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people including many Americans. And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. It's a very simple message. They will never have a nuclear weapon. This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States armed forces. I built and rebuilt our military in my first administration, and there is no military on Earth even close to its power, strength, or sophistication. My administration has taken every possible step to minimize the risk to US personnel in the region. Even so, and I do not make this statement lightly, the Iranian regime seeks to kill. The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost and we may have casualties. That often happens in war. But we're doing this not for now. We're doing this for the future. And it is a noble mission. We pray for every service member as they selflessly risk their lives to ensure that Americans and our children will never be threatened by a nuclear armed Iran. We ask God to protect all of our heroes in harm's way. And we trust that with his help, the men and women of the armed forces will prevail. We have the greatest in the world and they will prevail. To the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police, I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity or in the alternative face certain death. So lay down your arms. You will be treated fairly with total immunity or you will face certain death. Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don't leave your home. It's very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. For many years, you have asked for America's help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let's see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass. May God bless the brave men and women of America's armed forces. May God bless the United States of America. May God bless you all. Thank you. >> All right, folks. So, that is uh the message that President Donald Trump has given to the American people and to the world around this conflict that has now erupted in Iran. So, that is um just the very very beginning of what has occurred here. Uh overnight, we had the US and Israel working together to strike Iran. uh they hit multiple different sites throughout the region, excuse me, throughout the country including the capital cities and so on. And um essentially we are um people are bracing for this to turn into an allout sort of conflict. Let's see if I can switch those around. There we [snorts] go. So um Iran has struck back. All right. They sent missiles across the entire Gulf region. uh some of the debris fell into other countries as well and um their whole thing is essentially just it's really hard to tell exactly why they've taken the approach that they have, but they've sent out missiles to all of these different countries across the region. I'm going to break down some of that and just show you also some footage of some of the things that we've seen so far. So, uh this right here is off of Reddit and it said that uh there was an attack on a US radar in Bahrain just so you guys can see a little bit of this if you haven't already. devastating situation here. Uh there are obviously people that are going to be civilians that are going to um be hurt throughout all of this and I just want to preface with saying that that is uh terrible. Um so here we have uh some debris fell in Dubai as well. Uh so a lot of these countries in the Gulf have been intercepting a lot of the missiles that Iran has shot and because of that there's still some debris that's coming down. And here in Dubai there was um a hotel that was hit I believe from some debris. A quick footage here real quick. Um, very very terrible situation here is in Doha. And mind you, like we're talking about Dubai right now. We're talking about Doha. We're talking about places that are uh extremely high-end sort of uh safe places that we're supposed to assume that these are very safe places in the world. And we're seeing that there are some uh very very terrible things happening here. All right. Here's um this here. This was in Indoha, Qatar. The guy caught some footage of some debris falling from the sky. >> Oh my god. So, um, once again, these are not necessarily direct strikes right here. Uh, I've got, um, a tweet from Shanaka and some Pereira. He's done an amazing job of keeping people up to date with a lot of the geopolitical developments as they occur. And, uh, he said here that Iran just fired missiles at five countries simultaneously. Here's what actually happened to each of them. Bahrain confirmed a hit on the US Navy fifth fleet headquarters. Bahrain's own state news agency reported the strike. No casualty figures released yet. This is the command center for every American naval operation in the Persian Gulf and it was struck. Uh in the UAE, you had multiple missiles intercepted by Imiradi air defenses. One civilian that was actually killed in Abu Dhabi from falling debris. The UAE defense ministry confirmed the intercepts. Imiradis just absorbed an act of war on its sovereign territory from a country it shares a maritime border with. And then you had Qatar. A missile was intercepted. Zero damage. The Qatari interior ministry confirmed that. And the same country Iran just attacked is the country that hosted AID uh for 20 years as a gesture of regional balance. That balance ended this morning. And then you had Kuwait. The Kuna state news agency confirmed missiles were dealt with in Kuwaiti airspace. no reported damage. Uh Kuwait, which stayed neutral through every Gulf crisis since 1991, just had Iranian ballistic missiles flying over its cities. And then you had Jordan, okay, two Iranian ballistic missiles shot down by Jordanian military, confirmed by the Jordanian armed forces directly. Jordan intercepted Iranian missiles in June 2025 as well. That was in defense of Israel. This time, Iran targeted Jordan itself. Then you have Saudi Arabia. The farce news claim strikes. No confirmation from any Saudi source. No tier one or tier 2 verification there. Either did not happen or yet is not ready to say it did. Both possibilities carry enormous implications. So um the biggest thing here that Shinaka is pointing out is that uh all of these countries have done an amazing job of actually not allowing uh direct hits to really occur. uh for the most part a lot of them have intercepted these missiles and uh Iran has kind of done this weird thing of sending missiles everywhere and um that is something that's probably not necessarily going to be super beneficial to them in the long term. In fact, it probably accelerates, right? Um any responses from these countries and them all coming together. So, I'm not sure what their strategy really is here. Maybe uh there's something deeper to this than what I'm understanding. But uh one of the things that I also wanted to point out is that all of this happened uh right after the United States actually declined to use um Anthropic. Okay, so we're going to talk a little bit more about that later. Um but you know, less than 24 hours after the Department of War in the United States said that, hey, look, uh anthropic, you're not allowing us to use AI technology to the fullest capacity. And in that scenario, then we have to dump you and we're going to tell everyone else to dump you. and there's an entire, you know, whole thing going on over there, but now this has happened overnight. It's also worth noting that all of this is always going to happen on a weekend. Why? Because it does not allow the markets to actually react to this in real time. Uh it's a big part of, I'm sure, why these decisions are being made. We saw the same thing happen with Venezuela. We've seen the same thing happen for years and years. Uh you don't want the markets to be able to react to this kind of information uh in real time. It could cause calamitous effects. So, one of the things that I also wanted to point out really quickly is that, you know, last year in 2025, the United States did strike Iran. Uh, they had this incredible operation where they flew over Iran, dropped bombs that went underground to target their nuclear facilities. Um, and in that, you know, they said that they obliterated Iran's nuclear program. Um, and so a couple of weeks ago, people were coming out like, "Okay, uh, so why are you so aggressive about what's happening in Iran now? why are you getting ready to attack them if you already obliterated their nuclear program? They came out and said the United States said uh they're a week away from having a nuclear weapon again or at least having the materials that they need to build a nuclear weapon. And so uh this is one of the things that's kind of being debated about right now like what's really going on? Why would the United States go out and bomb Iran if they had already taken care of uh their nuclear facilities last year when they did that bombing exercise then? Well, surprise surprise. There's a big chance that uh this has to do with one of the world's most important natural resources. So Lee Wolf here, he said, "Look, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, Greenland, Panama, it's all interconnected and it all points to China. As US energy ramps up and China is deprived of subsidized oil, subsidized shipping channels, freedom of navigation through sovereign waters and allies that can cause the US problems. Their global position diminishes substantially and their cost of doing business skyrocket. Venezuela and Iran account for something like 20% of oil imports and they're getting an insane deal on it. China has a huge problem if that's if that oil goes away. You'd be forgiven for thinking Trump's foreign policy seems random and chaotic, but it's actually one of the most focused and thus far in his eyes this guy saying well executed foreign policies in the last two generations. So this comes in response to this article here saying that the US now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. Uh the US is now producing more than them there and also potentially more natural gas than both of these combined as well. So these are two things to keep in mind as we uh continue to monitor the situation. Uh essentially um China has very very much so depended upon Iran for oil and which brings us to the next point here. Uh first you know China's importing an average of 1.3 million barrels per day uh in 2025 from Iranian oil in particular. Now the thing that I wanted to point out here is that uh Iran throughout all of this has actually made a very important move. What have they done? They have actually cancelled any movement through what is called the strait of Hormuse. Now so Iran's revolutionary guards tell ships passage through the straight of Hormuse is not allowed. Okay. So essentially this is uh a region here, a strait that is responsible for uh 20% of the world's oil movement. Right? So, let me show you guys what I'm talking about. Uh, if you're uh in any way kind of familiar, you would probably have heard of the fact that uh Saudi Arabia is one of the largest um oil producers in the world. And uh they ship their oil uh through the straight of Hormuse and a lot of this region, right? A lot of big heavy oil producing countries. uh this is one of the most important um geopolitical regions in the world and so we can see very quickly here this entire region Iran, Kuwait, Baharin, Qatar, UAE uh all of them right are um this right here this area here is a straight of Hormuz and uh if oil is not coming out of here right then it's going to have to go in other places but a lot of ports for these large countries that are shipping and and exporting their oil this is where it's coming through and Iran is saying, "Nope, you can't do that anymore." And with that being the case, like I said, uh this is the world's most critical oil choke point. We're talking 20% of the world's oil supply that will pass through this single narrow passage on a daily basis. Uh here's a better hopefully a little bit just more clear graphic of what's going on here. So uh all of those countries there are dependent upon this and if it gets disrupted right and it is likely going to be disrupted this is very likely to cause a spike in the price of oil. Okay when you have a a constraint on the supply of something and the demand stays steady or in wartimes the demand might even rise then you're going to have a jolt up in the prices and this is something that everyone is certainly concerned about at the moment. So, just to be clear here, that straight right there is about 2 miles wide. Okay? So, it's very, very, very, very small. It's a very narrow place uh that you're trying to get all of these ships through in the first place. Um, so let's see here. So, the US Navy, right, is usually in this region patrolling and whatnot. And we've seen how the US has deployed a lot of its navy into this entire region over the past month or so. Uh so this is clearly something that's going to be very important if Iran is trying to close us off. Uh this is going to create huge instability in global markets without a doubt. Now uh Israel overnight they kind of said that they felt that uh there was a high chance that the supreme leader of Iran was killed in all of these attacks. But right now it's actually at least from what I understand it's not clear. We've seen some reports that he's dead. But I saw something else come out that said that he's actually going to be giving a speech in a couple of hours. So it's really hard to know for sure exactly what is going on there. But um so bullish oil. So let's take a look at what we can figure out about oil so far. So there's a couple of things that we can do. First off, I want to look at what happened with the close of oil. If we've been paying any attention here, which we have, we've seen that oil has very slightly been just pushing itself up ever since around December 15th here. It's very slowly making its way up uh from down here in the 50s up to the mid60s. We're at $67 per barrel of oil. This is US oil WT WTI crude. And um right now, right, so so clearly there was some anticipation of an event like this happening from the markets. It's one thing for the leaders to come out and say and jawbone and talk, but it's another thing for the markets to slowly react to that information as it's coming in because this was a signal that it was actually going to happen. Okay. Now, this is just what the market closed at on Friday. It closed at $67.28. But we also have uh some other markets that are trading at the moment in other countries which are called uh this is a type of contract, a type of financial instrument called a contract for difference. And these are currently trading at the moment. And they're showing that oil has surged about 10%. Okay, so this is an index. That's why it's kind of a weird pricing mechanism here, but um it's really a little bit more than 10%, but um I'm going to just say more than 10% of a spike in the price of oil is likely what we're going to see going into the next week. So just something to keep an eye on here. We're doing our best to monitor the situation if you will regarding what happens next with oil and this is one of those things to keep a look on. Now um poly market unfortunately is uh happening at the moment. So we're getting some information from poly market as well. Uh basically uh there's a 73% chance that Kamani the leader of Iran will be out by March 31st. So whether that is through him being uh obviously attacked uh assassinated or if this is through some other sort of regime change uh this is what uh the market is betting on. 73% chance it obviously has risen drastically overnight here. So I'm going to back up for a second. There's also people here who are going to be interested in what's happening. There's only so many markets that are trading at the moment. Uh Bitcoin, okay, Bitcoin had a little bit of a reaction overnight where it slipped some but it really hasn't moved. And I'll say that's pretty fascinating to see that Bitcoin has just simply not reacting to this at all whatsoever. Um, usually any market right that's going to be open and and where people can either take a risk on or off in a time like this, you would expect some sort of a reaction, but really nothing from Bitcoin so far. Uh, it's really just chilling out in this range. Now, one other thing that people have noticed, and this is really important, you have tokenized gold. Okay, tokenized gold has made a little bit of a run up uh over the past 24 hours. Here we're seeing that it's chilling out at 5424 per ounce. Uh almost making a new all-time high over here on the PAX gold in particular. Okay, so this is what's happening across the markets that we can identify at this particular moment in time. Now, uh will we expect gold to continue to rise during these times? I would say so. I uh played you guys a clip this morning on the YouTube channel from Stanley Draenmiller essentially talking about what he sees for what comes next with the world. I'll pull to add to this conversation because I do think it does kind of serve to understand what might be things to think about regarding how to protect yourself and your money throughout these times if we continue to get a heating up of the situation in a geopolitical uh format. So, I'm going to play this clip right here from Stanley Ducken Miller and then we'll step back and break it down a little bit further. Uh, here we go. There it >> appears to me the US economy is already strong and it's going to get much stronger cuz we're looking at the big beautiful bill looking a lot of stimulus. My guess is um the Fed is certainly not going to hike and probably going to cut. So, that's a backdrop. But against that backdrop, that would be wonderful if we were undervalued. We're not undervalued. We're toward the top of the uh valuation range historically. What would be exciting about developing a hedge fund portfolio right now is the one thing I'm sure of is there's massive disruption and massive change ahead. So actually for the opportunity set for the next 3 or 4 years, I'm really excited. Macro has been dead for 10 or 15 years. I don't think that's the case anymore. If you know anything about me, I tend to change my mind every 3 weeks. But given the backdrop, we would probably be long more an eclectic basket of equities. For until the fall, the last three years, our portfolio was very much AI driven. >> Mhm. >> We still have drips and drabs of AI around, but it's not driving the engine anymore to some extent. We still have big positions in Japan and Korea. Some of them are AI, some of them are not. We're bearish on the US dollar mainly because sort of the top of the historic range in terms of purchasing power and foreigners are way way overloaded in dollars and I don't know whether it's like a sell America trade because it's more like if they don't buy American assets on a net basis because of the trade balance and because of the positioning the dollar will go down on its own and we think that is the the most likely course here and uh we own copper. It's not a genius trade. It's a big consensus trade. Uh there's no supply coming on of meaningful supply very tight for the next 8 years and obviously you have a big add-on from AI and data centers. We're not long uh copper equities as much as we are the we just keep rolling the front end. We have some gold that's mainly a geopolitical trade. It's not so much a monetary trade. And then because we're long all these risk assets I just mentioned, we're short bonds. M I don't necessarily expect to make money short bonds, but I think we might make a lot. If I'm right on the economy and it's a disinflationary growth, I probably break even. I don't lose anything, but it allows me to hold the other assets I mentioned. If I'm wrong and the strong growth creates inflation, it wouldn't be that unusual if the Fed were to cut into a booming economy for inflation to take off, particularly what's going on in commodities. So, I'm open-minded to that. But, we create a matrix and the bonds are helpful in both ways. appears to me. >> Okay, so Stanley Ducken Miller there, I should have prefaced, is a very famous investor, multi-billionaire, is worth over $7 billion uh as we can see on the public record that is and uh has been around macro, right? He said macro is back. Okay, he's a big macroeconomic investor. He worked alongside of George Soros, participated in the shorting of the British pound where they both made over a billion dollars in that one trade. Now, what he's basically saying here, and I love the way that he was able to put this together, is that look, he's short the dollar, okay? But the question right now is how do you get short the dollar in a situation like this? What exactly are you going to do? Are you buying tech stocks? Are you buying um gold? Are you buying silver? Are you buying copper? He mentions uh what what can you do to get structurally short the dollar? Are you buying Bitcoin? He doesn't mention Bitcoin. Okay. Now, the reason that um I feel like this is hyper relevant, this came out obviously before what's just happened here with Iran. Uh may these people have uh peace upon them. Um he he was already saying that gold was a good geopolitical play, not just as a monetary play. He said, "Look, I'm not buying gold as a as a monetary play per se. I'm buying it as a geopolitical hedge." Because of the fact that uh you know, he said two different things here. He said, "Look, short the US dollar, okay? It's not just that people are trying to get away from America. It's that they're trying to find a better place, a safer place, a more neutral place to put their money." He says whether or not it's really short America or not is not necessarily what he's worried about. What he's worried about is people basically just taking back the sovereignty right from their money system and how they operate period. Is does that mean that the US stock market is not going to perform well? Does that mean that US stocks won't be great? that is not the case. Um, so anyways, just wanted to kind of break a little bit of that down. He also talked about being short uh being what did you say? Short bonds. Let me run that back real quick. >> All these risk assets I just mentioned were short bonds. >> Yeah, short bonds. And so short bonds, yields go up. He's not necessarily actually expecting the yields to go up. He says, he says what he's actually expecting is that yields won't go up and that inflation will stay in check while the US continues to grow, while the GDP continues to rise. Now, why is that important? That's important because in most scenarios where he said at the beginning where you expect rates to be cut, if you're expecting rates to come down in a strong economy, you're going to expect that to typically lead to higher inflation. Okay? But in this scenario, that's not necessarily what he's expecting. He's expecting because he didn't necessarily explicitly mention this, but because of technology, because of higher productivity gains that we're seeing across the economy, you might not necessarily actually see inflation. You might see a deflationary pressure on prices while the economy continues to grow and while rates get cut. Now, we've already talked about extensively why that would be a terrible scenario for the individual who was trying to get by. uh all of the productivity gains, all of that price pressure might very likely go into the profits of these companies and not necessarily into the wages of people. Now, obviously, if prices of real goods and services in the economy come down, then you get a wage lift from that as well. But the point being here is that gold he's very confident about. He says that copper is a consensus trade. So basically he's saying that everyone's aware of the fact that copper excuse me is in a deficit already, a structural deficit that will need to be addressed and if you don't then uh you're basically you're everyone's already on page with that is basically what I was trying to point out there. So um coming back to a little bit more of the actual situation at hand here as well. Um we've got uh a couple of things going on. Greek the Greek US naval base is tightening security. I'm just going to kind of run through some of the most recent things that have come through. Um you're going to have EU foreign ministers coming together to discuss the Iran situation. No reports of US casualties in um in the region. I guess it doesn't really say what they're saying there. Okay. So Iran has been striking US uh military bases and military forces. So they're saying that right now uh they have been defending themselves very well against that. We'll have to see as all of this continues to shake out. So here's a map right here of where the the air strikes have hit in Iran so far. You can see 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 cities it seems that have been hit already. Uh completely um rushing right and overwhelming I I imagine their security s uh forces at the moment. So, uh, some devastating images of what's going on. Obviously, the worst part of this is always the fact that you're going to have, uh, innocent people and civilian casualties that are occurring throughout all of this. Uh, people are running from their cities. Obviously, you've got travel in chaos as airlines are cancelling flights. Um, so big big big problems here. You have Kuwaiti hospitals in Kuwait. You've got 12 people that were received by these Kuwaiti hospitals. This was 2 hours ago. Um, there was an attack on a sports hall that killed 15 people in southern Iranian towns. Um, so these are just some of the things that I wanted to make sure that we caught up on. The CIA has assessed who would replace uh the Supreme Leader if killed. Um, this is the big thing right now, right? Because the problem here is that if you just remove the leader, what's going to happen? And we saw in Trump's speech that he said to the people, look, this is your opportunity to kind of take back sovereignty of your country. Uh this has been uh an ongoing thing that the United States has been trying to accomplish for many many years. I believe it was back in the 50s was one of the first times that the US started to get involved with trying to create a regime change in Iran. Uh and so now right that Trump has saying hey this is your chance to go out. We had people protesting over the past quite a bit uh in Iran a few months they've been out protesting and the Iranian forces have apparently been uh killing their own citizens in the streets as they've been protesting. There was reports of around 5,000 plus people that were murdered throughout this time that these people were protesting peacefully or at least they were out there and and just trying to exercise some basic human rights. And um that came after, by the way, you know, the United States had done a lot to uh put sanctions on Iran and essentially crumbled their currency and and crumbled their entire monetary system. And this was one of the things that led to people coming out into the streets and and protesting, right? when your money doesn't work, when groceries are going up to hundreds of percent uh you know higher than it was in the past, well, you don't really have anything that you can do, right? You you need to go out and sort essentially go out and protest in order to uh make a change. And so this is a part of the narrative of how this has all unfolded. You had the US once again putting sanctions on Iran, making it harder for them to do any commerce. This led to massive inflation or an extreme devaluation of their currency. People went out and protested. those people got murdered by their own uh government as they went out and protested as far as we understand and then from there um you know the US said hey we're going to come in and we're going to help it took about a month or two maybe before the United States has done anything but now they have started to strike the Iranian forces as well as are calling for the people to stand up and take this country back and to essentially put in a new regime in Iran but the problem here is that a lot of this obviously typically ends in massive chaos right It's very hard to really have a clear structure for what actually comes next when you just take the leader of a country out. Right? So unless there is an actual plan in place, unless the United States plans to have boots on the ground for a longer period of time, it's very hard to just assume that uh the killing of the leader is going to lead to a regime change that doesn't lead to the same things happening that have always happened in the past. So I just wanted to kind of go over that a little bit. One thing that I can go ahead and shift into here is that we had some other news that was going on uh before all of this occurred. And what happened here was we've got uh a couple of things happening with the Department of War. So this is highly relevant to what's essentially happening right now uh which was that you had uh the Department of War, the Department of Defense, the Pentagon in the United States is trying to figure out who they can use as their artificial intelligence provider. Uh a a month and a half ago or so, Pete Hexath and the Department of War put out um a statement essentially talking about how they are going to be very serious about using artificial intelligence throughout their entire uh command, right? And with that, um they essentially were starting to make some assertions and demands for what it is that they wanted to get out of that. And some of those things were things that one of their primary providers, the company Anthropic, was not necessarily super on board with. And so since then, they have been essentially trying to figure out, hey, um there's a couple of things that we're not okay with, said Anthropic. And these are our hard lines for what we don't want to do for the United States military because we don't think that this technology is evolved enough to do that at this point without there being potential casualties that would come to our own citizens or to our own military as well and to others in in ways that we wouldn't have expected. So um with all of that uh the United States yesterday said okay well anthropic if you're not going to do this then we're going to drop you. we're going to name you also a security threat and you're essentially going to be barred from doing any business with the United States government which would also essentially cascade into other problems as well. And this is a very very very big issue. So yesterday Trump directs US agencies to toss anthropics AI as the Pentagon calls startup a supply risk. So um this is the first time that this has ever really been done in history regarding a US-based company. for the US to to declare a US company a supply chain risk. This is the first time in history that that's happened. I'm going to play a quick clip from uh Daario Amod, the CEO of Anthropic in response to what has happened here. >> If you had a moment with the president right now tonight, what would you say to him? >> You know, I again I would say we are patriotic Americans. We have done everything we have done has been for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting US national security. Our leaning forward in deploying our models with the military was done because we believe in this country. We believe in uh defeating our autocratic adversaries. We believe in defending America. The red lines we have drawn we drew because we we we we believe that crossing those red lines is is contrary to American values and we wanted to stand up for American values. And when we were threatened with supply chain designation and defense production act, which are unprecedented intrusions into the private economy by the government, we we exercised our classic first amendment rights to speak up and disagree with the government. Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world. And we are patriots. In everything we have done here, we have stood up for the values of this country. So, uh, very compelling message here from Daario. Uh, there's a huge, huge, um, how would I say clash about this right now. You have people saying, well, this company, this private company should not be able to tell the United States government what to and what not to do with technology that's being built, especially in the United States of America. So, that's one approach. People are saying, look, this is national security. we can't uh have these companies, these private companies making value judgments on how to use this technology. There's been a lot of scenarios that have been put up in like a a joking kind of a way of like, oh, okay, so let's say that uh so let let me let me actually back up and actually show you exactly what happened here regarding what was agreed upon and what was not agreed upon and then we can give some scenarios of what this actually looks like. So, a couple of days ago, before the Department of Defense finally made its full uh decision, Dario Amod put out a statement about what's going on here and how they feel about uh basically bending to the knee of what the United States government actually wants from them. So, he said, "I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies and to defeat our autocratic adversaries. Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the department of war and intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government's classified networks, the first to deploy them at the national laboratories and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission critical applications such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more. Anthropic has acted to defend America's lead in AI even when it is against the company's short-term interest. We chose to forego several hundred million in revenue to cut off the use of clawed firms by that were linked to uh excuse me use of claw by firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Some who have been designated by the department of war as Chinese military companies. They've shut down CCP sponsored cyber attacks that attempted to abuse Claude and have advocated for strong export controls on chips to ensure a democratic advantage. Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit the use of our technology in an ad hoc manner. Now, there was two things that they said that they wanted to make sure that they were not participating in. And the first one of them is mass domestic surveillance. He said, "Look, we support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions, but using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AIdriven mass surveillance presents serious novel risks to our fundamental liberties to extent, excuse me, to the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, that is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI. For example, under the current law, the US government can purchase detailed records of Americans movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a warrant, a practice the intelligence community has acknowledged. Okay, so we need to do a full hard stop right there because [laughter] that to me was a fascinating statement and he linked to this article and I have to break this down with you guys because this is absolutely fascinating. So, in 2022, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, uh, they put together a panel and a report on what's called commercially available information. Okay? And now, there's obviously some redactions and whatnot throughout this report, but I'm going to give you guys a summary that I've put together from what I found inside of this document. Now the uh uh commercially available information is data that anyone can buy on the open market. Okay. So as we know over the past 20 30 years as the internet has been around there have been a lot of companies that collect our data and what do they do? They sell it. They sell it to companies. They sell it to other organizations. And the problem here is that in this what they make the argument for in this document here is that this can also be purchased by other foreign nations. Okay. This can also be purchased by adversarial uh uh people. So this is a really important piece of this conversation. So just give me a quick second to break this down. So commercially available information can include location data from a smartphone app. It can be social media data sets. It can be anything from a data broker website. It could be um credit consumer data, web browsing behavior, public records and aggregated analytics. And what you can infer from this kind of information could be where someone has been, their location, who they know, who they've spoken to, behavioral patterns, political and religious associations, purchasing behavior, and so on and so forth. So the point that they're making in here is that uh this information can be processed by machines and therefore can be used to train AI models. It can be combined with other data sets and can be anonymized deanonymized easily. So the way that the that the director of national intelligence was looking at this is that well this is extremely uh valuable for intelligence meaning commercially available information is extremely valuable for intelligence but adversaries can also buy the same data if the US doesn't use it then its competitors will use it. So anyways, uh this all leads into some research that was released very recently about kind of uh being able to uh oh about being able to uh very quickly and easily deanonymize data uh at a very cheap cost. So there was this uh research article that came out a few days ago from some researchers in Switzerland and what they found was that and this is also been like uh fact checked about this guy's interpretation but just to get the gist of this. This guy is saying that your internet identity can now be unmasked uh for $1. For1 to $4 is what the study found. you can basically very quickly at scale figure out uh what someone's uh anonymous online identity actually is by linking it across all of these other different data points that they have across the internet. Now, point being here is that this right here actually just came out. This but that statement about commercially available information was put out in 2022. Okay, but this so so so the United States government has known that this was something that they could do and they've probably been building tools to be able to do it for years now. Okay, but this guy is saying that this is kind of something that can be commercially done at this point. Uh the average person who doesn't have the government's types of resources could technically put something together and do something similar where you can deanonymize people's identities at scale because of the use of large language models in aggregating and taking information away from this data. Now, just wanted to get that out of the way because that is what Dario was pointing out here. He's saying that he has privacy concerns and uh about how their anthropic models could be used as mass surveillance weapons. He says, "Look, I don't want this to be how this uh this is being used." And then the second red line, the second thing that he said, "Look, I am not okay with the United States government using our technology in this way is in building fully autonomous weapons." He said, "Parti autonomous weapons like those used today in Ukraine are vital to the defense democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons, those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets, may prove critical for our national defense. But today, Frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts Americans war fighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, uh, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which do not exist today. Okay. So, basically, the Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who aced to any lawful use and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards. They have also threatened to designate us a supply chain risk. So this is before they they fully made that decision. And this is a label that's reserved for US adversaries never before applied to an American company. And to invoke the Defense Production Act to force these safeguards removal. The latter two threats are inherently contradictory. One labels us a security risk and the other labels claw as essential to national security. So basically from what I understand the Department of War has made two different threats to anthropic at the same time. They said, "Allow us to use this technology with no guardrails." Then we're going to label you a supply chain risk. But also, if you don't allow us to use this technology without guardrails, then we're also going to actually say that you have to do it based upon the Defense Production Act and because you are essential infrastructure. So, you're both essential infrastructure and a supply chain risk at the same time, which obviously would be a very uh rough designation to make and and also doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense according to uh Daario. So he said, "Regardless, these threats do not change our position. We cannot in good conscience uh aced to these requests." Uh oh, what happened to my screen here? Didn't mean for you guys to get switched around. So um he he said, "Look, this is up to the Department of Defense uh to go ahead and make their selection of who they want to work with, but we ourselves are not necessarily going to do this without these two safeguards in place." Now, oh man. So this has been a fascinating whole thing. I'll show you uh Trump's tweet as well about all of this because uh essentially yesterday he said he came out and they made the full announcement of the fact that they're going to get away from using anthropic. And so Donald Trump came out and said, "The United States of America will never allow a radical left will company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars. That decision belongs to your commander-in-chief and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our military." The left-wing nut jobs at Enthropic have made a disastrous mistake, trying to strongarm the Department of War and force them to obey their terms of service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting American lives at risk, our troops in danger, and our national security in jeopardy. Therefore, I'm directing every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease use of all anthropics technology. We don't need it. We don't want it, and will not do business with them again. There will be a six-month phase out period for agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropics products at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together and be helpful during this phase out period or I will use the full power of the presidency to make them comply with major civil and criminal consequences to follow. We will decide the fate of our country, not some out of control radical left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real world is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. And he says, MAGA. So look, the thing here is that we've got a massive issue on both sides of this, right? There isn't a clear answer here for what uh might be the right thing to do. The issue is is a couple things. You've got the fact that our the United States's adversaries like China and others who are getting ahead in this technology might not be putting these types of guard rails up, right? So, if you put these guardrails up while others do not, then you might have a situation where they can do things that you cannot. That's one thing that has to be considered here if we really just want to look at this as a face value for what it is. Now, on the other side of this, I'm going to just leave this up for a second. The other side of this is obviously that, you know, uh do we really want the US to be Why is it doing that? Uh to essentially be monitoring uh its citizens or doing things that would not be um constitutional, right? Uh regarding how to use these weapons or how to use these um this technology in as far as monitoring for its citizens, right? So there there's not really a clear-cut answer here to what is the right thing. I think I think uh this is a tough decision and I think this is a decision that I'm glad that Amod Daario is having to make and not myself especially understanding that he's you know also going to be sacrificing some money as well to uh make that happen. So the the the thing that was most interesting about how this actually plays out is that as soon as um uh Daario steps away from the situation, we've got um Open AI. What did they do? They swept right in. They struck a deal with the Pentagon hours after rival Anthropic was blacklisted by Trump. So uh Sam Alman said on X that his company has come to terms with the defense uh department for use of its models in their classified network. Now, what's the most uh fascinating thing about this was what Sam Alman actually said uh in his tweet. So, let's go ahead. Um yeah, so let's go ahead and do something. So, tonight he said, "We reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models and their classified work. In all our interactions, the Department of War displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are at the core of our mission of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human accountability uh for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The Department of War agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them in our agreement. Okay, so let's let's take a second real quick because everyone's confused about this. Like, does it really make sense that all of a sudden um does it really make sense that all of a sudden uh Anthropic is not agreeing to do these two things? But all of a sudden, Open AAI is saying, "Yeah, this is uh the two things that we said we're not going to do for the Department of War 2, and yet we've signed a deal with them." So, everyone's calling this out and they're like, "Well, that doesn't make any sense." Uh and the thing is is we'll never pro we won't ever see the agreement, right? this isn't something that we'll see. So, uh, but you know, he's saying that, oh, we're also not going to mass surveil American citizens and we're not going to use fully autonomous weapons, but we did cut a deal with the Department of War all of a sudden. So, anyways, it's clearly not real. So, um, this is this is definitely a a real major issue. Let's see what some of the people are kind of saying. Uh, this guy says, "Sam Alman is an incredible backstabber, liar, and traitor. While your competitor is uh taking a heroic and principled stand, you swoop in to make your deal. Imagine working for this guy. Is there a greater shame? This should lead to a mass exodus from open AI. Um so anyways guys, it's pretty um obvious that you know. So this guy says the Department of Defense just agreed to the same two conditions with Open AI that Anthropic was asking for. Can someone explain? I genuinely don't understand. Yeah, this guy said we're all going to die. That's terrible. Um, so anyways, just wanted to kind of give a quick update on this situation here as well, because it it definitely doesn't make any sense that um they would just all of a sudden uh be good. So, let's see what also this uh note is saying. Government officials have contradicted Sam's claim, saying open AI will allow the Department of War to use their models for all lawful purposes. This could allow for uses Anthropic refused to engage in, namely master vans, tools, and weapon systems with no hum uh human oversight. So, this is uh the senior official Jeremy Leuen, who was the official account for secretary of state foreign assistance, humanitarian affairs, and religious fre religious freedoms. So, um I guess yeah, so he said, "For the avoidance of doubt, the open AI contract flows from the touchstone of all lawful use. the Department of War has rightfully insisted upon and XAI agreed to. But as Sam explained, it references certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms. This again is a compromise that Anthropic offered and rejected. Even if the substantive issues are the same, there is a huge difference between memorizing no memorializing specific safety concerns by reference to particular legal and policy authorities which are products of our constitutional and political system and two insisting upon a set of credential constraints subject to the interpretation of a private company and CEO. Okay, got it. So basically what they're saying is that look, they don't like the idea that some CEO is going to be the one that gets to make the decision of like what is moral uh morally acceptable behavior or the definitions of an autonomous system or uh domestic mass surveillance, right? If we have a CEO or an individual who is not the United States government making the decision of what those terms actually mean, then that probably isn't going to work. And I think that's kind of what he's trying to point out here. So anyways, those were a couple of things that I wanted to point out. Um, couple other things that we wanted to go over. We had massive layoffs, okay, that happened, um, that have happened in this past week in this whole year has been insane. So, uh, everyone's trying to talk about is AI actually taking all the jobs? I think the question is a little bit different. We're going to have to think a little bit more about this. So, Challenger Gray and Christmas, a large uh research firm has come out and said that January had the highest uh layoffs that we've seen since um 2009. Okay. So, US-based employers announced 108,000 job cuts in January, an increase of 118% from the 50,000 cuts in the same month last year, which is up 205% >> [clears throat] >> um from the December cuts. And this is the highest uh for the month of January since 2009, which was obviously during the great financial crisis. Now, a quick message from uh uh Daario, the founder of Anthropic about some of these a layoffs. This was a little bit back, I believe, uh at least a year or so ago. Uh he talks about what he really thinks about the future of these AI layoffs and what this means for the future of work. So, let's hear him talk about this. I you've said AI could wipe out half of all entrylevel white collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10 to 20% in the next 1 to 5 years. >> Yes, that is that is that is the future we could see if we don't become aware of this problem. Now >> half of all entry- level white collar jobs. >> Well, if we look at entry-level consultants, lawyers, uh, financial professionals, you know, many of kind of the white collar service industries, a lot of what they do, you know, AI models are already quite good at and without intervention, it's hard to imagine that there won't be some significant job impact there. And my worry is that it'll be broad and it'll be faster than what we've seen with previous technology. >> All right. So, uh Dario himself seems to believe that there will be massive cuts uh to jobs that come and we saw over the weekend uh or over the weekend as the weekend started uh where some of this started to come into play with uh Block. Okay, so Jack Dorsey just made some massive uh a massive layoff announcement that I want to share with you. If you haven't seen it already, you probably have. Um Jack is the founder of Twitter, and he left Twitter a while ago to start working on some different projects. One of them is a company called uh Square, which is now named Block. And he said he made this whole note talking about basically how they're laying off 40% of their entire workforce. Now, uh everyone's freaking out about this. essentially mentions AI in this and says that AI is going to be playing a a massive role in why they're making these job cuts. Uh and a lot of people have had some clapback on this. There's like, hey, um really the problem is that you just don't know how to staff a company. But, uh this sets a precedent because when he did this, to be clear, uh the the price of his company, uh the price of their shares, excuse me, jumped by about 20%. Okay, so that was an important thing to notice. If we start to see companies laying off and then getting rewarded for that by the markets then that could have a very very interesting impact on how things happen moving forward. So this guy right here said a company with 24 billion this guy Akash Gupta says uh a company with 24 billion in revenue and 24% gross profit growth just cut 4,000 people while raising it 2026 guidance to 12 billion in gross profit. The stock ripped 20% after hours. Now uh the market added roughly 6 billion in market cap and that's $1.5 million in enterprise value created per eliminated role. He says that block is the canary in the coal mine and they are not alone. There was another job cuts uh from ASML that happened last month. Um and Salesforce cut 5,000 after AI agents started handling 50% of customer interactions. Amazon cut 16,000 in January and 14,000 in October last year. Uh he said that Dorsey has said the quiet part out loud. intelligence tools paired with smarter smaller teams have already changed what it means to run a company. He chose one massive cut over repeated rounds because his words said in his words gradual cuts destroy morale and trust. The restructuring charges are 450 to 500 million that the operating income block is guiding that pays for itself in two quarters after that pure margin expansion. That's why Wall Street rewarded it instantly. So, um, that's like the positive take or the pro- AI as in AI is actually this important take. And then there's a guy that says, "Look, when Elon Elon, uh, came in and fired 80% of Twitter, he's crazy. When Jack fires 40% of block, he's visionary." Honestly, I think the biggest takeaway here is that Jack just seems to overstaff his companies by roughly 40 to 80%. Um, little bit of a funny take, but also a potentially, uh, real look at the situation there. So, uh, another thing that's been happening here is that, uh, people are freaking out about the unemployment rate and what's actually going to happen. Uh, we had the Catrini article that came out a week ago or came out on Sunday, I guess this past week, uh, where it went over the doom loop of how people are or companies are investing in AI. Once those companies invest in AI, they'll have to lay off their workers. Those workers will not have money to spend. When they don't have money to spend, then aggregate demand in the economy falls more. And then these companies have to protect their profits by going out and investing into more AI. Now, uh, Poly Market, uh, basically has this chart here where people are trying to figure out, um, what are the chances of a 6% unemployment rate in 2025. Um, and they're saying that there's about an 18% chance of seeing a 6% unemployment rate in the United States. And let me tell you right now, that would not be good. So, uh, some concerns that this could actually go down. Now, a couple of, uh, anecdotes that I wanted to go over. um [clears throat] in this space. This guy called the tech layoff tracker. I think he actually just spun this account up. Uh this is just look I I don't know how real the statement is, but it's just a thought, right, for us to exercise together. This guy said somewhere that why was I not laid off. He said, "My entire team got laid off. Every single one. I'm the only person left. They're traumatized and I know I'm supposed to feel bad for them, but they got severance. They also have each other. Group chats and a nice way out. I got nothing." Well, actually now all of their work is just mine. No raise, probably no backfill, no conversion. People keep telling me to be grateful, but I feel overwhelmed and alone, like everyone left the bus but me. I want to leave. I need to leave, but how do you job hunt when you're suddenly responsible for everything and can't drop everything? I feel completely effed. Now, this is actually something that I think is really, really, really, really important to pay attention to because I also saw a statement around um I think it was Harvard um that made a statement around this idea that well work is not necessarily going to go away. What's going to happen here is that people who have jobs are going to start to get worked a lot harder. So, let me go ahead and try to find that real quick because I thought this was fascinating. They said that AI expands work. So, let me share my screen. really quickly here. Got a lot of tabs open, y'all. Okay. So, this new Harvard study uh shows that I AI does not reduce work, it intensifies it. So, task expansion happens because AI filled in the gaps in knowledge. So, people started doing work that used to belong to other roles or would have been outsourced or deferred. That shift created extra coordination and review work for specialists, including fixing AI assisted drafts and coaching colleagues whose work was only partly correct or complete. So multitasking rose because people ran multiple AI threads at once and kept checking outputs which increased attention switching and mental load over time. This faster rhythm raised expectations for speed through what became visible and normal even without explicit pressure from managers. So, uh, just something to consider here as we continue to have this conversation, um, is that it's kind of hard to know that it's kind of hard to think what's going to happen, what can happen here, excuse me, is that you get a reduction in the actual workforce itself, but the people who are working get worked overtime. They get worked in overload uh because their jobs have essentially been uh streamlined. And so everything that they would need to do is at their fingertips and there's no read reason to rely on other people for certain things and you just kind of have to uh keep up with uh what is at hand. So now um another big thing that people are talking about around about the whole AI dup loop doom loop is like well this isn't actually how it's going to go down. um there's electricity constraints, but what really comes uh what it really all comes down to is that if companies if companies start to just instead of actually waiting for the announcements or excuse me, waiting for the technology to catch up and actually be efficient enough to replace their workers. If instead they decide that they're going to get preemptive about this the way that Block did and just get rid of their employees regardless, then you could still get the doom loop. You could still have the big problem of the fact that people are laying uh people off and they're having no work, no way to spend money because they don't have any money coming in. Whether or not the technology is actually there or not, whether or not electricity is actually available for this technology to continue to develop and be there or not. And so this is the thing that we have to watch out for as well. Now, shifting back to uh the big situation at hand here. Uh trying to see if there's any new information that we have around what's happening in Iran. So, Netanyahu says Israel destroyed uh the Supreme Leader of Iran's compound. Trump's Iran strikes are testing the unity ahead of midterms. We've also had right this whole conversation around uh are we potentially going to have the United States declare an emergency around the elections for the midterm. that would be a very very massive deal if that is what happens. So a couple of things that I just wanted to point out before we uh hop off here and one of them is that uh Ripple uh made a very very interesting uh release of a document I believe it was yesterday. Now, for anyone here who's into digital assets and crypto, you know, this is something that uh you're probably not going to be super surprised by, but Ripple actually released a blueprint for institutional digital assets trading. And I wanted to share this with you because there's just a lot of things happening at one time here. Obviously, we had uh the problem with AI uh in the Department of War happening on Friday. Then we get this attack in Iran and but yesterday also we had Ripple putting out this document about institutional demand for for digital assets and what they outlined throughout this document I just want you people who are interested in this to have this and to know that this exists so you can go and review it on your own. They've outlined the concept of having a prime brokerage for uh where institutions get their entry into digital assets. They say look right now the way that the game works is that there's a whole lot of fractionalization. you always have to go to some particular exchange in order to make your digital asset swaps. And each of these different exchanges have their own liquidity and their own silos of what order books are being matched where. They said, "Hey, why don't all of you banks is you're going to come into this space instead of working with these exchanges just come to one prime brokerage where we sit in the middle of all of that and we aggregate liquidity for you." So, essentially, that's what this is all about. I just wanted you guys to know that that existed uh before I get out of here. And um let's see here. So so yeah, everybody, this is kind of been my breakdown of what's happened so far. I'm going to have to continue to just see what's going on as all these two happened regarding um uh the situation with Iran. Obviously, this is a devastating situation. We are clearly heading into uh potentially a much higher volatility scenario. This is something that, as I saw someone say, could either be over within the next 72 hours or that could actually happen and go on for the next, you know, could could go on for years for all we really know, especially considering the fact that this is creating a conflict throughout the entire region, right? Iran has been obviously one of the stronger players. A lot of people don't know, but Iran is also a highly populist country. Uh Iran has a population of around 93 million making it the 17th most populous country globally representing about 1% of the total world population. Uh so you know this is a very large country. They have a nice amount of resources. The United States has done their best to obviously choke them out of all of their resources by using sanctions and bringing them to a place of weakness. But at the end of the day um you know this could be something that ends up being a much bigger deal over time. So yeah, as Robbie uh Jay Davis, thank you for being here and thank you for moderating, Robbie. I really appreciate you. As as uh she has said, please, if you have any uh questions or anything, you can go ahead and get them in now. I'll stick around for at least another 10 minutes. Um just wanted to see uh what else you guys have going on or what's on your minds, what you want me to look at uh with the time that we have left here. Let's take a look at what's happening with the whole crypto thing. Oops. Yeah, I mean digital assets have obviously been getting absolutely smacked down. Um kind of hanging out hanging out before what I imagine will be another leg lower. So we are just at the very beginnings of uh essentially what could be a uh an extended downturn for these digital assets. That is kind of what uh what I'm thinking of here. Thoughts on Greenland? Yeah, I'm not sure that I have any thoughts on Greenland. Um we went over some of that as that was going down. Uh it's an important space for as far as airspace goes. You know, uh Russia if they want to launch missiles at the United States, uh Greenland sent uh in a very important place where the US would want to have defense for that in place. It seems that they kind of uh very swiftly got what they really wanted there. The US did um which was just to be able to put more stuff in place over there. Uh they don't I don't think they really wanted to acquire the place per se. Uh, so that's all I can really say about that. Um, SJH, I see your comment. That's funny. Um, Victor said, "Taiwan, China 2026." Yeah, this is what people are starting to talk about now. Um, they're saying, "Well, this is probably going to be the thing that tips China uh toward Taiwan, right? Because, okay, if we're going to take all the oil, right, if we're going to choke off China's access to oil, well, then they could choke off the US's access to these chips, right, in Taiwan. So, that would be a very, very clear move that they could make next, and that would be the thing that absolutely escalates this to a whole another level. Okay, let's see. Am I excited for the future? It said phosit. Am I excited for the future? O I am someone who tries the best to enjoy the present and really really soak in that because otherwise things can get really um it can get really gloomy, right? So I I try not to think too much about the future. I try to be optimistic about the future when I see opportunities to be. So, so I I mean the thing about it is either way, do we really have a future? This isn't philosophical corner. I'll leave that for the other channel. But um but the present, right, is that that famous quote, you know, the future is not real, nor is the past. Uh all you have is the present. That's why they call it the present. Um, Stormman Japan, will this have any effect on currency exchange rates? O, I mean it can. It can. Um, the reason that that can happen is because of the impact that the price of oil can have. uh for instance um I believe it's the Australian dollar typically tends to move uh with oil uh based on the fact that they are a huge I believe uh exporter of oil over there and I do think that that is a part of the equation so you can see some currencies move upon the oil price that's one thing and then the other thing is that well if this leads to any other sort of trade arrangements right where you know you start seeing sanctions on other countries countries who will start to try to help Iran or whatever. That could obviously also have some in impacts on currency markets. Okay, let's see. So, Julian said, "Since copper Julian Ceruan, since copper is not a money metal, how would stacking copper become profitable?" Well, uh, any investment opportunity, any asset, you're always looking at supply and then demand. Uh, if you have something that has demand as an industrial material such as copper and you have a supply constraint, which with copper you have structural deficits of how much copper is actually being uh, essentially refined and and mined and refined versus how much of it is demanded. You already have that issue there. uh then you would have a supply constraint and a constant demand at the minimum and potentially an increased demand due to the need for copper in things like data center buildouts and all the other industrial demand that may come up around the world. So you've got a supply constraint and a demand that stays constant or potentially rises than you have an increase in the price of the asset. Yeah. And I think it's just a it's it's a much let's look at copper real quick. It's a much easier thing to say that the demand for copper due to the industrial use case will be there than there is to say that um that like countries are going to continue to buy gold even though they've been buying it up forever and ever for the past decade and a half now. Uh or that uh silver will for sure be used as a monetary metal in this new world that we're moving into where the dollar goes down. I think what I liked about Stanley Jucker Miller's statement is that he's not relying upon the dollarization uh necessarily as the reason for gold to move. He's not relying upon um he's not relying upon it being used as a reserve asset as much as a geopolitically strategic asset, which sounds kind of like the same thing, but it is a slightly different uh approach, right? So, I'm seeing some other stuff around. I see you guys on the gram. Shout out to you for coming through on the gram as well. Shout out to you on the gram. I see you. Um, let's see here. Is it too late for gold or should I go all in right now? Oh my goodness. Let's look at gold. Oh man. Oh man. So, look folks, we talked about it, right? A couple [clears throat] weeks ago, I guess it was maybe maybe it's three weeks ago now. Everybody wanted to buy gold up here. Nobody wanted to buy gold down here, right? Come on now. I know some of y'all were buying. I remember you guys talking about it. But um you know the problem with going all in is definitely not the answer right here. Um but uh but the structurally there's no reason why gold doesn't continue to perform in my eyes personally. I I'm not uh I don't think that what's happening with gold is in any way over. I think there will be multiple moments like what we saw where you get 10, 15, 20% crashes, maybe even deeper ones uh over the next 5, 10 years. But I think what's going to happen here is that we start to see that gold uh is that monetary asset that all of the boomers had been saying that it was for quite some time. Oh, you can't see me. Oh no, what happened? That's unfortunate. Yeah. Well, all right, guys. Let's see. Do I see Bitcoin being pegged to the dollar at any point in the future? I'm not really sure what that means. I guess you're saying like being backed the dollar being backed by Bitcoin maybe is what you're kind of saying in some way. Um there could be some Bitcoinbacked bonds. I don't think that's a overly crazy thing. Okay. No. Yeah, my my camera did go off for a second. The watch hangout said a good time to be a plumber. Yeah, I totally agree. Okay. All right. Now, Cryptocore 121. Yes, sir. RFB FTP. You're a wild one for that one. >> [laughter] >> Oh my goodness. All right. Well, I mean, look guys, um Oh, I guess you know what would be fun is to talk about some controversy on Twitter because there's actually some lessons in some of this that I think are worth talking about. So, um I've got an incredible uh person working with me helping me get some stuff out. And uh someone uh was making these claims about [snorts] uh there was a couple things. There was one about stable coins and then there's one about let me go ahead and pull up the Twitter. Then there was one about um the financialization of crypto and people are just getting really upset about this. So, I basically in one of my videos, I came out and I was like, um, you know, Bitcoin and its value proposition as a scarce asset potentially gets threatened when you can, uh, create all of these financial derivatives and assets on top of it. And I've just learned how crazy Twitter is. I I had no idea, but but people get very upset about these kinds of things. So uh one of these was actually a very intelligent response which was uh documenting XRP said EETFs require purchase of the underlying asset so does impact the market cap. The rest of what I was saying here makes sense. So first off it's really important to understand that there are different kinds of ETFs. Okay? So you have ETFs that are for the spot price of something uh where you would essentially have to go out and buy the actual underlying asset as an ETF provider. There are futures ETFs that are essentially using futures to track and tack onto the price of an asset. There are um futures that are based upon strategies like like option strategies. I mean you can buy an ETF that pays you a dividend based upon the fact that there are option strategies that are being deployed upon the underlying thing. So, an ETF in itself is not necessarily requiring you to go out and buy Bitcoin. The point is not that uh in this video is not about um the spot ETFs. It's about all of the financial instruments that have been built on top of Bitcoin. Okay? And it it I'm not saying that also that it has to be the answer to uh there's no more scarce Bitcoin. Everyone is so black and white. Uh I'm not saying that. I'm saying that there are things to think about. And obviously, this is a clip from a longer video, so there's also no context. These people don't, right? They haven't seen the full video. Um, but I'm not saying that this is the answer or that synthetic float ratio is just like kills Bitcoin. It destroys the whole value proposition. All I'm saying is that it questions it. And I do say that in this clip, but anyways. So, what I uh responded to was look, spot ETFs do require purchase of the underlying, but there are other kinds of spot of ETFs, excuse me, including futures ETFs, just as an example. Two, ETFs can have derivatives built on top of them. For instance, you can trade uh options on top of IBIT, which is the spot ETF that Black Rockck has for um my goodness for Bitcoin. Uh the third thing I say is I mentioned here ETFs, futures, options, and any synthetic products, right? So, just to be clear, I'm not saying that uh spot ETFs don't um change the equation. And then a ton of people talking about, well, uh, what about for gold? Um, someone else said it's like, oh, the gold is the same thing. Gold and silver is the same thing. Like, guys, I like this video was not about gold. So, anyway, I just wanted to uh kind of use that as a really the the ETF thing I think was like a really well uh intentioned and and intelligent comment, and I just wanted to uh use this as an opportunity to talk about different kinds of ETFs, I guess. So, that is something that I thought was worth talking about. Let's see. Another thing that if you're here and you haven't already, you got to subscribe to my live show that I do with Ben Levit. It's called Memes and Markets. We go live every Tuesday and Thursday at 12:00 p.m. Eastern. And if you missed it, you'd better believe we had Charles Hoskinson on on Thursday, a couple days ago. So, if you missed that, you definitely got to go check us out over there on memes and markets. Yeah, CRIGs, a covered call ETF like JPQ. Exactly what I was talking about. A small thank you for the insight. The watch hangout says with the super chat, blessings to you. Thank you so much. I really, really, really do appreciate that. Um, thank you so much. Yeah, Maria Fing, no worries. Thank you for coming through. I'm definitely going to be making my way as well. If you guys don't have anything else, go check out the the podcast. It's a really good time. We go live every Tuesday and Thursday. We have been having some incredible guests. Next week, we also have some amazing guests really talking about uh both the markets and what's happening in culture and how these things continue to intertwine. It's so much fun. And you also or I also, excuse me, learn a ton being there. Can you believe that y'all? We really had Charles H. >> That goes by I think thread guy >> into English. So, so does it really matter who who spoke the first words of Bitcoin if it's a collective problem of evolution? >> So, um yeah, be sure to go check that out. Uh Charles Hoskinson, if you didn't know, he's the founder of Cardano, uh the founder of a project called Midnight, and apparently he doesn't like people to say this, but it's true that he is the co-founder of Ethereum. Okay, so he's been around in the game for a very, very long time and it's fundamental to the space being what it is. And um [clears throat] huge shout out and thanks to Charles for taking the time to join us. We got to talk about a lot of really fun things and he does a good job of breaking down the systems that we have today and why they don't really work uh the way that uh we would all like for them to. So, be sure to check out that show that we have with Charles Hoskinson himself and you can find that all in the link in the description. Okay, so if you go to the link in the description, it says subscribe to memes and markets and you can see uh the button to go and check us out over there. Um so definitely definitely do that. Come here. If you come into the stream >> and you hit this button right here, memes and markets pod right there, hit that subscribe button. We appreciate you so very greatly and thank you for joining me on this Saturday. I appreciate you all for sticking around as well. Y'all are incredible people. You know that I'll be live again next Saturday at around this time. I went a little bit early today because um we had the situation with Iran. I wanted to get to you guys as soon as I could. Uh, PHX MX said, "Keith, quick questions. Who raised you and where did you study? [laughter] Uh, I really appreciate it. I was raised by my parents. They are amazing people and um I studied." So, a lot of people keep asking that question and I I want to respond with letting you know that I talk about it more on the podcast and I'll and I'll definitely answer that question on the podcast. I think we'll do a full video where we talk about uh both our paths, Ben and I. Um, but I'll I'll tell you that my what I did to study was super irrelevant, right? It's super hyper irrelevant to all of the conversations we're having here. Um, yeah, like it it literally has nothing to do with uh any of this. So, I'll talk more about that in depth on the podcast uh at Memes and Marcus. So, be sure to go check that out and subscribe. Uh, because I I love to talk about those kinds of things, but I feel like this isn't the right format for it. I think it's a better format. Plus, you know, it just gives you a reason to go subscribe to me markets. You know what I mean? Um, let's see. Yeah, I appreciate you guys. Impress me. See you later. Thank you for being someone who's always around. I appreciate you. >> [laughter] >> More monkey business 589 said, "If you hit the like button, you get free tickets for Mexico." That's right. Hit that like button. Hit that like button, folks. Mars Build said, "You're the goat, Keith. Hope you know that. You're the only financial YouTuber I follow, and I recommend you to everyone I know." Wow, that is a huge honor. I appreciate that, Mars Builds. That's super [snorts] super cool to hear. Yeah, that's right. What a sale. That's correct. Uh so all of this uh stuff that I'm trying to continue to learn and trying to continue to get a grasp on like someone said like impress me said YouTube uni like honestly a lot of my time has been spent on YouTube listening to people who are way way way way smarter than me as well as reading books uh trying to get my own sorts of uh angles on things. And I really highly recommend reading books. I've been um struggling with that since I've launched this YouTube channel and this has all gone down. So, I got to get back to it. Uh when I do, you guys will certainly continue to get much more out of me. And most of that will come on the podcast because that's where I get a lot of my live insights and things that I'm learning in real time. You'll you'll see it. What a sale said, "Hello, Keith. I've been loving your shows." Thank you so much. I appreciate that. I really really do so so very much. Yes. Yes. Yes. All right everybody. Um this was a lot of fun. I appreciate you. I mean unfortunate situations uh that are going on in the world and let's definitely all be passionate, be compassionate, excuse me, with one another. Be understanding. Um and let's do our best to just try to make this world a more peaceful place with the communities that we have around us. That is what I will close the stream off with. And um I'm Keith D here to talk everything money and markets. Have an amazing weekend. Try not to let this stuff get to your head too much. And until next time.

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