LIVE: Will Oil Crisis Crash The Global Economy? - What's Next for Markets

All right, I believe we're live. Welcome in. Happy Saturday. I hope you are making today the best day of your life. What's up in the chat? I see. What a sale. Yeah, man. I I love that you're uh it's uh it's me today. It's just me on this channel, but uh obviously Ben and I will be live again on Tuesday on Memes and Markets. And uh the Nuclear Boy Scout said, "I wonder if Jake Claver's theory might actually play out." We'll definitely be chatting about some of that today. What's up everybody? Say what's up in the chat if you're here with us. So today we're going to very quickly go over some of an update of what's happening with the situation in Iran. We're going to talk about what this means for markets. We're going to talk about the importance of oil and the impact that it's going to have on global markets. And we're going to take a look at how markets have been reacting to everything so far. And of course, we'll talk about what to do about it, right? and and how to position and just think about at least what exactly uh is going to come next and how to position around all of that. So, on top of that, I do have an announcement of a partnership that I am beginning that I'm super excited to uh bring to your attention as well. So, welcome in. Let's go ahead and just start off with what's going on in the markets because uh I think that's going to be the big thing. Excuse me, I didn't mean that. I meant in Iran. Let's start off with what's been happening in Iran. Another thing that did just happen, by the way, is uh the White House yesterday dropped Trump's cyber strategy. Okay, so that was something that came out of nowhere. I hadn't seen that until today. But uh let's start off with the most recent thing that's happened in Iran that's going to potentially define what's coming next. So the the big thing here is there's a lot of messaging coming out of this entire conflict that is pointing toward the idea that the United States is not really as successful as uh people are being told and there's a lot of damage that the US has been taking regarding some of their infrastructure in terms of like radars that they've built up in the region. But um we're we're going to talk a little bit more about all of that. But the big thing here as well is we'll watch some clips from some people who are really intelligent about all of this. But the big problem here is that there's a a large amount of really important resources that are flowing through the straight of Hermuz. It's not just oil and liqufied natural gas. So Iran has closed off the straight of Hermuz. Uh 20% of the world's oil is flowing through there. About 20% of the world's liqufied natural gas is flowing through there. But so does fertilizer. And for them coming in, they're importing over there the Gulf countries uh food. Okay. And one big move that just happened that is going to be problematic around how this all continues to escalate is that it seems that someone has struck a freshwater desalination plant on an island in Iran. So the thing here that's going on is that Iran and the other Gulf Coast countries on the other side of the straight of Hormuz. Let me just go ahead and pull up the straight of Hormuz so you guys can see. You got Iran up here on the north, right? And then you've got all of these Gulf Coast countries over here on the west south and almost all of them are completely desertous countries, right? And because of that, there's not a lot of water. And all of the water is coming from the sea here. Uh, which requires them to use that water uh, and desalinate or take the salt out of that water in order for it to be actually usable within these countries. And what's just happened here is that the US just struck a freshwater desalination plant um, on Keshum Island. I'm not sure how to pronounce that. And the thing is is that Iran can also do that back, right? They can do that to the other countries, right? They can do that to uh all of the Gulf Coast countries. And that's just something that first off is also not uh necessarily legal to be taking these actions cuz this is not an attack on the military, right? This is an attack on the people at this point. And it also just escalates the war in a way that um is not ideal. So, let's actually go ahead and listen to um a couple of things from Professor Jiang as we continue to get into this one more piece. Uh so, Trump, I think it was earlier today, came out and said that uh Iran has surrendered to the Middle East neighbors, right? So, they're saying, "Hey, we're not going to attack uh our Gulf Coast country members uh our our people across the Gulf, okay? We're going to try to keep it all cool over here at least. But, um, a lot of reports have said, well, as that was happening, there were strikes going on. There seems to be a dis, um, a disarray between the actual official Iranian governments and the RRGC. And so things are just starting to heat up a lot. But let's let's listen to Professor Jen talk a little bit more about the straight of Hormuz. Oh, well, that's not it. and uh the importance that it has in this conflict. Really quickly here, we'll tell you things to keep in mind about this map. This is what we call this area. Okay, really small. It's 33 kilometers wide. Okay, people can swim across it. It's really really um uh narrow. Okay, this small area, guys, it's called the moose. All right. And >> can you guys hear this? Let me know if you can hear that. >> It's important because it's really the center of the world. This one area is the nexus, the pivot of the world. Let me explain why. First of all, from the GCC, you have 20% of all the world's oil flowing through this narrow straight. Where does it go guys? It goes to Asia, India, Pakistan, South Korea, China, Japan. India depends on 60% of its oil from this area. China depends on 40%. Japan 75%. Prime Minister Takiichi of Japan has said that listen, if the shums closes, we're going to have oil in about 8 n months. the entire Japanese economy would collapse in 8 n months if the circle moves were to close and guess what the Iranians have closed the circle moves. Okay, so we can expect that the entire global economy will suffer greatly over the next few months. All right, so that's point number one. Point number two is okay, so the GC sends oil across the shoo and what do they get back in return? food, guys. All right. So, people don't appreciate the GCC, but it is really the lynch pin of the American Empire because what is the American Empire? The American Empire is the petrol dollar. All right. The idea of the petro dollar is this. The US dollar is worth nothing. It's only valued what people want it. But the GC says that if you want oil from us, you have to pay us in US dollars. Okay? then that is the basis of the value of the US dollar. So if the GCC collapses, the American economy and the American empire both collapse at the same time. The problem though is the GCC is an artificial construct of empire. It does not exist naturally. Why? Because that's no food. There's no oil, no water. Okay guys, no food, no water. So these cities are able to grow in the millions because of all these petrol dollars flowing in. If you close off the moose, there's no food coming in, right? They're all going to starve. How much food does the GCD get from overseas? 80%. 80% of all the food it consumes comes from overseas that it imports. It doesn't grow by itself. It imports. All right. So, the sugar moose is really key. And again, the Iranians will close it in order to strangle the global economy and therefore bankrupt the American empire. All right. Second thing you will notice is these mountains. These mountains is what we call Iran. All right. This is Iran. This is GCC. Okay, this is not a fair matchup, right? Because these are mountains. And what can you do in mountains? Well, you can hide rocket bases. You can hide drone bases. You can hide missiles. And that's the entire Iranian offensive strategy. All right. From here, they can hide missiles and drones from which to attack the GCC. And what are they attacking? They're attacking um three things, right? They're attacking American military bases. American military bases. That's number one. Okay. Is [snorts] it possible for the Durans to defend against these attacks? The answer is no. THEY'RE NOT. IT'S NOT. IT'S THE SILLIEST THING IN THE WORLD. YOU HAVE all these bases in the Middle East, but you cannot defend them against the Iranians. That's kind of strange. Okay, that's number one. Number two is oil and energy. How hard is it blow up an oil field with a drone? Not hard at all. Can you defend these oil fields? No, you cannot. All right. Number three, this most important is water. Okay, you guys don't know this, but the GCC has little access to fresh water. So, the only way that it can produce water is what is what we call desalination plants. Okay, these factories that take salt water and then through electrochemical process turn it into fresh water for the population to use. 60% of the water supply in HC comes from desalination plants. Okay, 60%. Is it hard to blow up this dissalination plant using a drone? The answer is it's very easy. You understand? Okay, so you have this absurd situation where Iran is a mountain fortress where it can hide its offensive capacity and the GCC it's just this desert, this flat desert and it is exposed to attack and there's nothing it can do about it. Okay. So now, one of the things that he does not mention here that's also a massive massive problem with what's coming through the straight of Hormuz is fertilizer. So this is another massive issue that is uh just bubbling up around this entire crisis. So this article here points out the real threat from a straight of horses closure isn't an oil shortage. It's a global food crisis. So um a couple of things, right? So the first thing that they point out here is that the global food system has a far thinner buffer than energy markets, right? The thing about energy markets is there's different types of energy, right? There's different ways to um get energy. You've got diversified energy sources within each country. You also have stockpiles of things like oil. We'll talk about the strategic petroleum reserve in the United States. Um, but the big thing here is that we're talking about a very very large percentage of fertilizer which is needed for just about all of agriculture, right? And it's a specific fertilizer called erea is uh about a third of it is passing through the straight of Hormuz alone. So, um, we've seen this show up in the pricing of this fertilizer in the past few days where it's gone from being around 442 per whatever that unit is up to 583. So, about a 25%ish gain in the price of this fertilizer in just a few days, right, into this conflict. So this is another thing uh people are thinking about oh well this is just something in the Middle East no big deal who cares. This is going to have massive impacts across all of the economy uh all over the place and potentially beyond just the economy and into realworld impacts on how this stuff will uh really have an impact on everyone's life. So, just wanted to point that out because I didn't see him talking about that in particular in this clip of of Professor Chang here, but that's another really important piece of what's going on. So, a quick update on some of the things that we've seen happen um today. We also had Kuwait confirm that they've cut oil production. So, that leaves I believe two countries now that have stopped their oil production. I believe it's Kuwait and one other one. may have been Bahrain. Um, and the reason for this is because of the fact that you have uh a bunch of oil just piling up. There's no more capacity for the storage of the oil in the region. Okay? Uh because the ships aren't able to pass through the straight of moose. So now you've got all these ships that are just sitting there with all this oil. All of these refineries or excuse me these uh production facilities that are producing pumping oil, they're they're they're out of space to put it. So they have to halt production. Now, you know, the spillover effects of this could be pretty massive. And the first thing that we want to talk about here is obviously the impact that this is going to have on the oil market. So, we're going to listen to a quick excerpt from a David Lynn interview with a guy named Josh Young where he talks about what he thinks this could lead to for the price of oil. And so far, we've already seen an impact. Let's just quickly touch on that first. So, right now, WTI, West Texas Intermediate Oil, is sitting at $89. If we look at Brent Crude Oil, it's sitting at uh $90. And this is the largest weekly gain that we've seen for oil since 1982. Okay? And that's percentage- wise, right? So, it's just a big spike here in the price of oil. And this is very likely to continue and to also eventually spill over into other parts of the market. So, let's quickly listen to Josh Young on this topic >> in uh global supply chains as to why the straight of hormones closing would necessitate $200 and a barrel. Uh and obviously that means much much higher gas prices at the pump for all of us. So if you look back at co for example um actually oil prices collapsed and to a certain extent some futures went negative for a very short amount of time. Now obviously the conditions are completely different but for the layman the result is the same which is a supply chain disruption and so what is fundamentally different about the straight of horm closing and uh supply chains being disrupted from oil tankers being stalled in 2020 both are supply chain disruptions but what is the difference? Yeah. So the the big thing for oil during CO wasn't the supply chain disruption. It was that governments forced people to stay at home for extended periods of time which killed oil demand and temporarily pushed oil demand down by close to I think at its peak close to 20 million barrels a day which is amazing that actually you have had most oil consumption sort of still continuing even with people essentially locked in their homes by government edicts in Canada, US, various other western countries, China intermittently. So, um, this is almost sort of a mirror of that where in it's not like there's a 20% demand boost, but there's a 20% supply cut essentially where about 20% of oil exports come out from the straight of Hormuz and then um a meaningful amount of liqufied natural gas exports come out from there as well as various other chemicals and chemical precursors and so on. Um so it's a similar um similar proportionate effect and so in the same way as you saw oil go negative from that sort of demand shock proportionally similar I think you could see prices go similar the other direction from from this uh supply shock. >> Can the US draw on a strategic uh petroleum reserve uh to alleviate some short-term pressure on the oil price? This is uh this is from the EIA and as of December 2025 it's reported that the SPR has over 400,000 uh barrels in reserve. Is that enough do you think? >> Yeah. >> So really quickly let's touch on this concept of the strategic petroleum reserve. So, the United States has what's called the strategic petroleum reserve or the SPR. And this is the government's stockpile of crude oil. And so, this was something that was created so that the United States could have a stockpile of oil in events like what is occurring here or for any sort of an event that would put a supply constraint on how much oil the United States has access to. So any sort of a major supply disruption is what this is created for. It could be a war, it could be an embargo or even a natural disaster, right, that they put this in place for. And this was created uh in 1973 after the oil embargo when Middle Eastern oil producers cut exports to the United States and other Western countries. And at that time it created major gas shortages. Uh there were price spikes and long gas lines that were across the United States. So uh in response the US passed the energy policy and conservation act in 1975 actually is when it fully came into effect uh which created the strategic petroleum reserve. And so the idea here is uh if anyone wants to cut the US off from oil well we'll have the US will have its own supply that it can pull from. But um the truth is is that this has a limited amount of impact that it's really going to have. You've got these caves that are in Texas and Louisiana that are the main sites where uh these there's these giant underground caverns where they're storing this oil. And at full capacity, the strategic petroleum reserve can hold somewhere around 714 million barrels of crude oil. But for some perspective on that, the US is consuming somewhere around 20 million barrels per day. So that means that the SPR could cover about 35 days of total US demand for oil. But uh it's also worth considering that the US is not going to just release all of this at once. They slowly will make the oil that's in the strategic petroleum reserve available. And so there's two main ways that it will ever get released. And this is through one being an emergency release if there's some major disruption to supply like a war in the Middle East or some hurricane that damaged refineries or the second scenario is when there's just a market stabilization effect that is needed. So sometimes the government will release oil simply to reduce price spikes from whatever uh reason that that might happen. So for instance in 2022 uh the Biden administration actually released 180 million barrels to reduce gas prices after the Russia Ukraine war disrupted overall supply. So I'm describing this because this is going to be a big part of the discussion here is is this going to be a reason to start to use the strategic petroleum reserve and if so what impact is that actually going to have? Um, a couple of things that's important to understand is that the SPR stores crude oil and not gasoline, right? Or the end product that you get from oil. So, this helps refineries get access to oil that they can then uh turn into fuel, but it doesn't you don't just have just gas, right, sitting in the strategic petroleum reserve. That's not exactly how it all works. So, in this clip here with um uh David Lynn, he's asking him about, hey, what about us using the strategic petroleum reserve? Is that an option uh that can kind of come into play here? And I want to quickly show you what Lyn Alden was saying um about this as well as well Josh Young. Okay, so he said, "Whoops." This is uh who we're actually listening to. I didn't realize he was also in the tweet. He said, "Whoops. the weekly US ending stocks of crude oil in the SPR. And if you pay attention there uh like I was saying in 2022 that number started to decline. The amount of oil in the strategic petroleum reserve started to decline as the US was using this oil to prevent having to uh have higher oil prices at the time due to the Russia Ukraine conflict. And at this point we can see that it never really fully got refilled up to those levels that it was at prior. Now, so Lyn Alolton said, "Well, at least we proactively refilled the strategic petroleum reserve before all of this." Oh, wait. That didn't necessarily happen. So, let's hear Josh Brown fully talk about um that. I I'll rewind just a little bit so that he can set up the question. >> Draw on a strategic >> the other direction from from this uh supply shock. >> Can the US draw on a strategic uh petroleum reserve uh to alleviate some short-term pressure on the oil price? This is uh this is from the EIA and as of December 2025 it's reported that the SPR has over 400,000 uh barrels in reserve. Is that enough you think? >> Yeah, it's 400 million. Um yeah. So the problem is you can only draw >> 400 million. >> You can only draw I think it's something like a million maybe 2 million barrels a day out of that but um it's quite difficult to draw a lot out. Frankly, we should have been drawing on this um as soon as we as soon as bombs dropped. If we started drawing on it ahead of time, that would have been a you know, we sent mill we sent aircraft carriers. I guess that wasn't enough of a signal. But, um if we had pulled on this before invading, um then it would have been a signal. Um I think I think this not being drawn on yet is a sign or at least not being announced to have been drawn on is a sign of sort of unpreparedness or unceriousness by the Trump administration regarding this operation in Iran. uh we should certainly be drawing on it and it's not because the US is under supplied. The US is actually fine. We're a net exporter of oil. All this is actually good. The shock is not good. But higher oil prices are net beneficial for uh you know just like for Saudi Arabia higher oil prices are good for their economy. Higher oil prices US is also a net exporter and oil is very capital intensive and very labor intensive. Higher prices over time are good. Um but you know this is a shock and this is what the SPR it was literally built for a disruption in the straight of Hormuz. If you look at when it started it was around the Iranian revolution uh in 1979 because of the physical disruption that's literally for this and it's very sad that it was drawn on for you know to suppress prices ahead of elections and for funding for various things like our politicians literally robbed our future. They robbed >> they they robbed us of our ability to not have this shock because of their budget constraints and ridiculous partisan politics. So we were robbed. It should be released now. Um and it was built for this and it's at half size because Biden drew it down in 2022. It was not necessary then and it was certainly not necessary to bleed it off over the last couple of decades in order to, you know, have slightly lower budget deficits. So, um, one thing that I do want to also kind of point out here is that Josh here, um, he points out that the United States is a net exporter of oil. Now, while that is fundamentally the case, uh, and the point that I believe he's making is that, uh, higher oil prices not necessarily be a bad thing for the United States in terms of, uh, the companies that are selling oil and the profits that they're going to make. But there's a nuance here when it comes to thinking about the actual use of the oil in the United States that has to be considered, which is that the oil, a lot of the oil that the United States actually drills out of the ground is actually exported to somewhere else for it to be refined and turned into um and turned into actual fuel. Now the reason for this being well let me let me keep going. The US imports oil as well right and it imports a different kind of oil. Okay, we talked about this when we were talking about what's going on in Venezuela, which uh in Venezuela, they have a heavier type of crude oil and the refineries that are in the United States from what I understand are built to refine that heavier crude oil and not necessarily the lighter crude oil that we have that we produce in the US. So the US is exporting the light crude oil somewhere else for it to be refined at refineries that are made for that and is importing oil that's a heavier type of crude oil. And so although the United States has um a strategic reserve, although it has this net export position of oil, right, there's this like excess amount of oil, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's an excess amount of oil that the United States can actually use, right? So, um feel free to correct me on any of that if you guys have some updates on how that works, but um that is my understanding of the situation. So um a few things to touch on regarding uh this whole idea of having these strategic reserves and what that has meant. So, as was kind of being mentioned here, it would have made sense to really stockpile this oil, right, going into a war. It's basically everyone's talking about, well, why wouldn't we have at least increased the amount of the um strategic petroleum reserve before making a move like this? How are you just going to do this without preparing for it? And on the other hand, on the other side of the ocean, we saw that China, for instance, was actually doing that. So in February, Zero Hedge actually pointed out that China's unprecedented oil stockpiling sparks questions if Beijing is preparing for war. This was back in the middle of February. And Zero Hedge came out yesterday and said, "Yes, it was." And two, China has 1.2 billion, as much as 1.5 million barrels um excuse 1.5 billion barrels in it strategic petroleum reserve. So, um, one thing to consider there, right, the big question here is how involved is China going to get in this war? Because you've got Russia, you've got China, and depending upon whether or not they decide to get involved with this, it's going to really change the dynamics of what the United States can actually do, period. Right? Uh, if you get China involved in the war, uh, then things are going to get a lot more serious and very quickly, and all of this spirals into a much larger conflict. Peter Zahan uh one of the most uh respected uh geopolitical geopolitical analysts on the YouTube space at the minimum uh he came out and actually gave us a little bit of knowledge around what's happening regarding China and the straight of Hormuz at the moment as well because China does have a relationship with Iran a very important relationship with Iran and it turns out that there's something going on here right now that might not have been reported by the mainstream outlets. So, let's hear Peter talk about what he's seeing between China and Iran at the moment and how the US may or may not be trying to get in the middle of this conflict. So, let's hear him. >> Iran has been using to target the and we're seeing a few things settle. It appears that the United States really has gotten a bit of a grip on the ballistic missile launchers that Iran has been using to target the Arab states on the western side of the Gulf. Uh, SenCom says that day seven compared to day one that the number of missiles that Iran has made fire are down by 86%. That might be a little optimistic, but it's definitely over 3/4. Uh, there's really hard to get day- on day reporting because it's such a broad area. Uh, anyway, uh, it's made a big impact. We're talking about singledigit uh to low double digits of missiles being launched at any particular location. And so far, interceptor stocks are holding if barely. In the longer term, this is still Iran's fight, at least this specific vector. largely not because of missiles but because of drones. Um missile launchers require a truck that can take 50 tons or a rail system. A drone just requires a rack in the back of a truck to be welded spot welded together in a few hours. So it really doesn't matter if the Americans take out the drone launchers cuz those will just be back in play very very soon. The question for the drones isn't the launchers. The question for the drones is the uh the manufacturing process. Now the United States has taken out several spots where this was centralized. But uh some of these things are made out of plywood and styrofoam literally. So you can make them in a garage and they have already had a significant dispersal pre-war uh of their manufacturing capacity. But the bigger problem is going to be China. Uh while the straight of Hormuz is closed to any normal traffic, the Chinese use a lot of shadow fleet vessels and those are apparently still going through at night and the United States has not set up any sort of blockade of Iran's ports. They've sunk the navy but they've not destroyed the port infrastructure or gone after the cargo ships that are coming in. So, I've seen reports overnight that the Chinese are sending cargo vessels into the Persian Gulf. And keep in mind that the majority of the components that end up in a Shahhead drone originate in China and then there have some manufacturing add-on and assembly in Iran. So, we're in this really weird situation at the moment where the US Navy has its greatest concentration of power in decades in the Persian Gulf and the Chinese are literally shipping war material into Iran to make drones to attack US assets. Uh it does not seem to me that this is a viable option over the midterm, but at the moment the Trump administration has decided to allow it or just ignore it u despite the damage it's causing and how it's eroding the few number of interceptors that are left. When and if the Trump administration does decide to either confront China with this or just stop the vessels from docking, uh then we're in a very different situation. Uh the Chinese get the majority of their energy from the Persian Gulf. They are the country on the planet that is most dependent on flows in absolute terms from the Persian Gulf. So basically here there are components that Iran needs to be able to continue to create the drones that they're using in this conflict. And China is where they get those components. And China is still shipping those components through into Iran. And so uh quick breakdown here because I also saw this put together. These these drones that Iran has been putting together are being produced at somewhere around like $20,000 a pop, which in terms of being able to carry a a an explosive load uh that you can deploy to certain parts of the world, maybe not over the ocean or anything, at $20,000 a pop is pretty cheap, right? When we're talking about military budgets of billions of dollars. So, let me show you a little bit of something here, too. I thought this was fascinating. This was a news report that was put together around the US actually reverse engineering these types of uh drones. So, let me let me play this clip real quick. >> US military is using a brand new weapon system in this conflict. Let me bring in a life-size model so we can have a look. This is the Lucas attack drone. It stands for lowcost unmanned combat attack system. It's about 10 ft long, about 8ft wingspan. It's powered by a propeller so it doesn't give off a big heat signature that can be tracked easily. carries about 40 pounds of explosives. And interestingly, this was modeled after, clone from an Iranian drone, the Shahed 136 kamicazi drone. The Shahed is a real favorite with the Iranians. And when one was captured by US forces, they took it to engineers and said, "Make us a copy of this." And even better, now when the Iranians are launching their drones to attack outward, the US is turning a very similar device back upon them and turning this small weapon into a big player in this battle. >> Fascinating there. Uh some people were leaving comments saying really like the US is having to copy uh the the strategies of you know this smaller country that's not as powerful this and that and whatever. I want to give a quick shout out to X account01 for the super chat. I really appreciate your super chat there. Very very much appreciated. Um so a couple of things that people have been pointing out around uh oh well the US doesn't rely on the Gulf for oil and therefore uh this is all way less important than it may seem. Uh so uh the Cobaces letter puts out a quick piece here talking about the US dependence on Persian Gulf oil has never been lower has almost never been lower. US imports of crude oil from the Persian Gulf countries are down to around 500,000 barrels per day near the lowest on record. Imports from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar have declined about 2.5 million barrels per day since the peak in 2003. Just nine years ago, the US was receiving 2 million barrels per day from the region. The current level of imports is now only above the 2020 pandemic shock in the 1980s low. So meanwhile, US crude oil production stands at 13 million barrels a day, near an all-time high. So the US is more energy independent than ever. So once again, when we see this narrative, because this is going to continue to come up of the US is not getting their oil from the region, we really have to be careful about what kind of oil it is that we're talking about. uh and in fact Shinaka Shanaka Pereira put together a really good piece uh regarding this and thinking about not only the oil that we're producing in the United States but also the oil uh that's being produced in Iran as well because there is a really big difference in how this goes down. So he points out that crude oil is not a uniform commodity is a spectrum of hydrocarbons with different molecular weights and the composition of crude determines how easily it converts into products that refineries actually want to sell. Right? So you've got this crude oil, but you've always got to turn that into something that you can sell. And as we talked about a little bit earlier, there's different types of crude oil. So um the Iranian the Iranian light crude oil has what he's defined here as uh 33 to 36 degrees API gravity. So the API gravity the lower the pi gravity means the heavier the recruited the crude which requires more energy more processing steps more capital equipment and produces a higher share of lower value residuals. So the heavier the crude, the more expensive it is to turn that into real uh diesel or fuel that we can use. So Iranian uh crude and he talks about Venezuelan. Okay, Venezuelan has a very low air gravity which means it's a heavy heavy crude whereas the Iranian one is double that in terms of API gravity and therefore lighter. And then West Texas Intermediate is super light crude, right? Compared to the rest of these. And so the point he's making is that Iranian oil fits where both US shale and Venezuelan heavy do not. It is the liquid that flows through the middle of the global refining system without requiring either the coing infrastructure for heavy cruds or the blending operations for ultra light shale. And that molecular fit is why it commands a persistent premium above comparable grades. is why Indian refineries maintained Iranian crew purchases through every round of sanctions and negotiated the logistics to keep that flow moving. It's why Dubai shadow banking and trading networks in the UAE are now considered are now considering dismantling. Okay, hold on. Okay, that's why it existed in the first place. He was saying because they're considering dismantling this whole trade network. So the straight of Hormuz doesn't just carry oil. It carries a specific category of oil that the global refining system was built to process most efficiently. Closing it does not just reduce supply. It removes the grade of crude that the system runs best on and forces every refinery in the world to run less efficiently on whatever it can find as a substitute. So these are some of the major things that I wanted to kind of just talk about that I've kind of been gathering as things go on. But I think now is also a good time to actually look at what's happening in the markets. So over the past let's see here uh couple of months when we go back to the beginning of the year this is the Dow Jones index right here Dow Jones Industrial most of the equities markets in the United States have just been moving sideways completely moving sideways uh throughout all of the AI stuff going on we really saw dispersion where we saw some stocks go down and then others go up on that kind of news to keep things flat right if you've got an index an average and some things are going down but some things are going up then the thing can stay flat, right? And so uh but just this past week we did see a dip in the actual price of some of these indices. So the S&P 500 not as dramatic as the Dow Jones Industrial. Same thing for the NASDAQ. Nowhere near as uh intense as the drop that we've seen in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but we are starting to see the markets finally slide. When you see the market chop around sideways like that for such an extended period of time, you can pretty much expect that what comes next is a decline, right? Especially at the beginning of the year, it's almost text from what we saw last year. If we scroll back and we look back to what happened last year, let's see, where were we? Yeah, so January went sideways, went sideways, went sideways, and then it dipped at the deepseek announcement. And then for the rest of that time, we had all the stuff with uh the the tariff announcements and all of that continued to tank the markets even further lower. Now, we're starting to get an actual retracement in risk assets, a risk off sort of a sentiment coming in through this war. At first, they weren't even really reacting to this. The markets, the indices were not really reacting at all. And just this week, at the end of the week, we started to finally finally see a slide. Now, my personal take on what's happening here is that this is probably going to be something that can continue. The fact that the markets haven't responded at all to what's happening to me says that there's a real opportunity for a surprise to the downside. I talked about that in the video today, right? Why would we chop sideways at the beginning of a war? That doesn't make any sense. That means that if anything really bad happens, then the market is going to slide drastically. It's almost the opposite of what we've seen multiple times throughout the past couple of years where if anything, just the bad news alone has led to a massive price decline. And when just the news alone leads to a massive price decline, then that means that there's just maximum uncertainty. And when there's maximum uncertainty, then that can provide the maximum opportunity because of the fact that the market has slid off of just speculation on the fact that we don't know what's going to come next. Right now, on the other hand, what we're seeing right now is the market's saying, "Well, I don't care, right, about this that's going on. This should probably not be too big of a deal." Well, in that scenario, I'm going to be a lot more uh on edge about the fact that anything bad that does happen, any bad news announcement that we do get is probably going to slide a little bit lower. So, uh that's what I said in the video today, kind of thinking about, hey, I think that that might be the one thing to keep an eye on is any news that we get about, you know, the war not being as short as we're being told it's going to be. It could be literally just that alone. um or some you know escalation of the conflict right then you're going to see a decline in this uh index in these indices in general. Now on the other hand we have oil. Okay this is obviously the other big thing to keep an eye on right here. Oil is pushing up very drastically very quickly. Uh this is something that unless we get a drastic change in the state of what's going on it's going to continue. Okay. And it's not going to be something that it happens really slow. oil almost moves like the VIX, the volatility index where it just kind of like spikes, right? And then after that, it'll slowly kind of make its way back down and cool back off. But, uh, we're just at the very beginning of what could happen here. If we look out through through history, if you look back to the higher prices of oil, you've got June 2008, you had oil at $240. Now, we have to keep in mind here that this price is not also naturally adjusted for inflation at all. So, that $240 price that we saw in 2008 was not really $240, right? We'd have to adjust for inflation. That number would be a lot higher, right? It might be like $300, $400 per barrel of oil at the time. So, um my guy said quarterly theory. Where is that at? Oh, okay. It's on the uh it's on the chart. So, um, so just keeping all of this in mind at the moment, uh, oil spiking that's actually happening. We've talked, uh, on Memes and Markets, the live show that I do every Tuesday and Thursday, we had a guest on. Um, a lot of controversy around this guy. I've seen some of it. His name is Jake Claver, and he has this thing called the XRP domino theory. Drop a one in the chat if you've ever heard of the XRP domino theory. Um, and uh, one of the first things that he said that would need to happen is for a spike in the price of oil to happen. Okay. Now, I'm pointing that out because we're going to we're going to talk about crypto and what this may mean for crypto in just a minute, but for now, uh, oil is spiking. It's probably going to continue. The reality is that there's not a really easy way to deescalate from where we're at now. You've got a lot of uh claiming of this uh conflict with Iran going really well for the United States. This is great. This is fantastic. The US is winning. But in reality, what we're going to start to see is that um it's probably not going to be as easy as we're being told it would be. And so, um this is one of the first things that's going to show us, right, that that this is getting serious. And now I want to back up a little bit too cuz we had a live stream a couple weeks ago where we talked about uh Mark Steen. Mark Steen and how he had uh a theory that he put together about what was going to be the best stock of the or not even just stock the best move to make in the markets uh in this year. And the whole idea that we talked about was like uh shorting abundance and longing uh longing uh scarcity. And just to pull it back up because this was kind of wild. Uh he wrote this in September 2025 and he says, "What if Exxon is the next Nvidia, the game changer that nobody sees coming?" And we broke this down. If you want to go back, you can go and check out that entire uh video where we pretty much break down this entire entire thing. He goes through and he talks about why Exxon is essentially the company to keep an eye on as all of this stuff continues to go on. Uh it really just the AI race alone, right, is what he was referring to at that moment. And um well, he talked about that in September 2025. The price of Exon Mobile at the time was $113. Over the past few months, we've seen the price of this stock go up to as high as $159 just over that few month period. We talked about on the channel how if we really had been watching the price of oil over the past few weeks, we saw that it was slowly starting to creep up from some of these lows that were made uh back here in December, right? Just slowly starting to creep up, creep up, creep up as all of the talks in Iran were going on. And then what happens? Bang. War starts. Huge spike in the price of oil. And um a lot of you know uh opportunity, right, has just come out of that. Looking back at Exxon Mobile again. Okay, we saw back in December prices started to rise pretty drastically. That was a little bit of a sign. Okay, we can now see in retrospect that that might have been a little bit of a sign to tell us that things are heating up across the globe because if you pay attention here, Exon Mobile has been chopping sideways since October 2022. Okay, it hadn't really made too many crazy moves, but it started to pull off in January as well during the Venezuela situation, too. So, um, energy in general, there's an, uh, an ETF that tracks the energy, the largest energy company, some of the largest energy companies in the United States, and it's called XLE. This ETF, not getting paid here, let me tell you right now, I'm not getting paid for this one, is one of the most robust trackers of energy stocks in the United States. The cool thing about it is it also pays a dividend as most oil companies and energy companies pay dividends. Okay? Now, obviously at this moment this is extended. Okay? So, this isn't necessarily a time to be trying to make moves on it. But I do want you guys to be aware of looking at the different sectors in the economy when you're looking at um these equities markets. Okay? And one of them, one of the ETFs that tracks a sector of the market is the XLE Energy Index. keep an eye on this right as we continue to go through this conflict for looking at potential opportunities to consider. So, um, just wanted to show you guys that. Let's quickly look through some of the sector ETFs, see if there's anything that I want to point out, and then we'll talk about gold, and then we'll talk about crypto. So, gold, uh, I think this came up on somewhere. Oh, it came up on the podcast at memes and markets. We were talking about uh how gold immediately had this negative reaction uh on Tuesday and essentially as this war started, we saw gold kind of slide a little bit. And I said, okay, that's an interesting move for it to make at the beginning of a war. Okay, what's happening in this conflict is by far going to add a lot of demand for oil. I mean, for gold, excuse me. And in fact, right, once again, this is another thing that might have been a signal this entire time. Okay, this might have been a signal that, hey, geopolitical conflicts are heating up. There's been a lot of people that were saying, hey, gold, when's the last time gold hit an all-time high and had a crazy run without there being a war, right? These things only usually happen during wartime. And people were saying, "Hey, this means something really bad is about to happen." Okay. So, in retrospect, might be kind of obvious, but now we can see that this is how um we can start to have our our our eyes and ears aware for what's going on in the world and what these types of things may mean. Uh markets tend to know things before uh news outlets do, right? And uh and it's because there's money on the line, right? there's direct economic and financial impact of information and so the information can kind of flow through the markets before it hits the radio waves. Now, um big thing here. Yeah, no stupid question. The question was I got a question here. How does oil move? Uh how does oil stocks move with oil? I think was the question. I'm not seeing it at the moment, but that's a really really good question because right there's there's a lot of things to keep in mind. A company has a lot of different risks that the commodity itself does not, right? A company has uh what you call market risk, right? Or not market risk, excuse me, non-sistemic risks. It has individual risks. I forget what you the word actually is, which means that the company, right, is one company. For instance, if something happened to um the refineries that BP has or that Shell has, well, that one company is going to suffer from that. Whereas oil itself doesn't care if uh BP's refinery gets shut down. Uh that just means all the other competitors can now produce more and make more money while they're shutting down and trying to figure all that out. So, um, while a a company, which is why, by the way, we talk about XLE in the ETF because that way you don't have to choose a winner. Um, and you can still get exposure to the entire sector. Uh, with the commodity, if there's a higher demand and higher price, everyone wins. Now, who who owns the commodity? Usually what I observe is that when oil prices rise, so do the prices of the stocks that are in the oil business. A lot like what you see with the miners for gold and gold or the miners for silver and silver. It's a different reason. It's a different model, right? Because you've got cash flows, you've got profits, you've got assets, but you usually will see that these things are going to move in correlation with one another. Key example here, Wheat and Precious Metals is a gold miner. Okay, you can see that this is what's happened over the past few years for their stock, right? And you can see how that aligns with the price of gold. Okay, so just wanted to point that out. Now, let's talk about the real stuff. And I've got an important fantastic announcement for all of you as we move into talking about crypto and Bitcoin in particular. So before I tell you about the announcement, I want to be clear that this right here looks like it's going down. And when you've got war on the line, I'm going to assume that it's going to continue to go down. And once again, when we get that riskoff moment, I'm I'm going to say when let me let me back up. Let me say if we get a big riskoff moment once again, whereas markets get surprised to the downside, then I'm going to expect the price of this to go lower. I'm going to expect the price of Bitcoin to go lower. So, for everybody who is trying to figure out, oh, what do I do about Bitcoin? I I don't know yet. Is this a real thing? Is it all over? Is this a big scam? A big Ponzi? A lot of you in here seem to not be huge fans of crypto and Bitcoin. And I totally understand. But what I'm going to go ahead and go out on the ledge and say is that when we get this next leg down for Bitcoin, it is very likely to produce what I believe will be an incredible opportunity for people who want to get exposure to this asset class. I was talking to someone last night and we were talking about well someone actually brought this up to me called the cone of futures. This concept called the cone of futures and I thought this was fantastic. This is a very beautiful concept that I had never heard before and I used it when I had now learned this when talking about crypto and Bitcoin because there's a lot of people that are just like, "Oh, I don't care about crypto. It's a huge scam. I'll never do it." Whatever. Blah blah blah. Well, there's a problem with taking something that has a high Okay, let me say it this way. There is the reality of the data of what's happened with Bitcoin, which is that it's gone from being worth pennies to being worth over $120,000 that through history. Okay? So, you can you can completely ignore that if you want. But in reality, this is real. This is what has occurred. So, let's say though that there's a possibility that Bitcoin will be worthless one day. Okay, that that might be a possibility. Let's say that there's also a possibility that Bitcoin goes up to a million dollars one day. Let's just imagine that that's a possibility. This cone of probabilities helps to kind of describe what asymmetry means and why it matters when we're talking about Bitcoin and crypto. So, let me go ahead and just kind of talk about what I'm what I'm looking at here. You have these different cone of possibilities. You have the possible future. You have what might be the preferred future, which for you might be as someone who's a naysayer, you might say, "Oh, well, I don't um well, I don't want Bitcoin to be real. I think Bitcoin is a scam." That's your preferred future is that Bitcoin goes to zero. Okay, cool. You have a probable future and then you have a plausible future. Now, this is just a concept, right? Just to think about, hey, what's possible here? What are the different uh probabilities and possibilities? and what weight would I like to assign to them? So, let's say you're a huge Bitcoin naysayer. Are you going to subscribe a 0% chance that Bitcoin reaches a million dollars? Because if you're doing that, then you might be putting yourself in a compromised position because you probably would have said there was a 0% chance that it reached $100,000 as well. You probably would have said that there was a 0% chance that it reached $10,000 as well. But the problem is is that it's not a 0% chance. And if you are waiting your future on the idea that there's a 0% chance that this is the right thing or that this is going to work or whatever that it goes up to a million dollars, then you have now hurt yourself. Essentially, you have now damaged your opportunity. You've taken what you had was as a potential opportunity. You've you've reduced it to zero for no reason. The thing about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general is that they are providing an asymmetric opportunity. Meaning where let's say you put $20 into the NASDAQ. Let's not use 20. Let's say you put $100 into the NASDAQ and the NASDAQ is going to rise by 10% every year. Well, at the end of two years, you're going to have 120 bucks. Just imagine 122 bucks, right? But with Bitcoin, let's say the average return, I believe, is somewhere around like 30%. Right? So, three times as much as you'd get from putting it in the NA in the NASDAQ. And it might be worth considering that the NASDAQ has just as much of a opportunity to go to zero as Bitcoin. Now, maybe not, right? That's not the point that I'm trying to make, but you're you're dealing with a risk asset, okay? Where whatever you put in could go to zero. Period. So when you keep that in mind and you think about the fact that you've got a 3:1 opportunity here to put into Bitcoin, Bitcoin has a three times higher return that you're going to get versus the NASDAQ. These are just examples. I'm not saying it's exactly like this. Then having a 0% allocation to Bitcoin is shooting yourself in the foot because you would only need to allocate say 5 to 10% into Bitcoin and if you get a 3 to one return on that then you've still right given yourself a higher ch the probabilities the expected value of playing that game is much higher when you put anything into Bitcoin than when it's zero let's say you even just put 1% of your portfolio into Bitcoin if that went to zero your entire portfolio is barely affected But if Bitcoin goes to a million dollars or if it does that 30% annualized return, then you've had an asymmetric output on your portfolio, right? So let's actually do the model. You've got a million. 1% of a million dollars is $10,000. If you put $10,000 in Bitcoin and it goes to zero, you've only lost that 10K. But if you put that 10K and you put it into Bitcoin and it goes up 3x or 30% a year, 30% a year, let's say 30% a year, then you made $3,000 after just one year. And after five years, you've made well more, right, than you would have from that same amount of money going into the NASDAQ. So hopefully I'm in some sort of a way describing to you the concept of asymmetry and why having 0% exposure to Bitcoin or crypto is something that is not necessarily going to benefit you in terms of actual expected value at this point. Right? If you really look at the data, Bitcoin has continued to go up over time. And when you're looking at the expected value, you're you're not playing the right you're not playing the game of investing properly by just having a 0% allocation of Bitcoin. Now, hopefully some of that was helpful to someone out there in the world. Next time, I'll try to actually properly prepare to describe the concept of asymmetry in your investing and how it impacts your portfolio. But with all of that said, I have an exciting announcement to make, which is that for people who are coming into the space of Bitcoin and you're trying to figure out, hey, how do I do this? I've actually just partnered up with Caleb and Brown. So, Caleb and Brown is actually a personalized brokerage service in the crypto world. And by the way, guys, I have never done anything like this on this channel. I have never ever ever taken on any sponsors at any point in time, but I did just sign one with Caleb and Brown. And we've been talking for months because I wanted to make sure that if I was going to do this that it was with someone that I actually trust and I actually believe in and that actually is providing a unique value to the market. Caleb and Brown, what they're doing is they're actually allowing you to talk to someone when it comes to making decisions about your crypto. And so in the link in the description, I'm going to further talk about this, but in the description, there's a link where you can go up and sign up for Caleb and Brown. I'll tell you why I recommend doing it. The major thing that I always tell people when they're coming into this crypto space, especially for new people, is I say, "Look, you want to have as many different avenues to be able to buy and sell crypto as possible." Tons of reasons behind that. Uh there's all of these hacks that occur. There's all these things that go down and you want to put as much you you don't want to rely on any one place, right, to have all of your crypto at. And for someone who is new to the game, Caleb and Brown is by far one of the best places to start your journey because you're getting access to someone who is a dedicated broker who will bring you into the space, get you caught up, right? I can't take calls with everybody onetoone, right? That's one of the things that I used to do at the very beginning of the channel. I can't do that. But these guys when you sign up with them they will be able to talk to you and they will be able to give you assistance with looking at uh your portfolios and and strategies and DCAing right dollar cost averaging into the market and all of that. Uh they they have 247 customer support service. Now they also have institutional grade cold storage custody. So, they're partnered with one of the top-of-the-line providers in that regard, and it's called Fireblocks, and they have one:1 backing of your assets at all time. And by the way, Caleb Brown has been around since 2016, which is very, very few, very, very few uh cryptocurrency brokerages or exchanges have been around for that long. So when you guys would like go ahead click the link in the description and just sign up for Caleb and Brown. You can also email my point of contact over there. His name is Jim Jim Bazani and his email is in the description as well. So if you have any questions about any of how all of this works, send him an email and he'll get in touch with you and he'll take care of you. That's jim.bazanicaleband bazani at caleb andbr.com. So, super excited about this. You guys are going to see more from them. We'll even have Jim come on every once in a while and just like talk about what's going on in the markets and what they're doing. But, I just want to let you guys know that this is a part of uh these live streams. Uh they are now fully being sponsored by Caleb and Brown and you can see their logo in the corner over there as well. So that's Caleb and Brown and um welcome Caleb and Brown to the Keith D family and yeah if you guys ever are just looking for another place to make sure that you have some support in your digital asset journey Caleb Brown is a huge proponents they're a huge rather uh service serer of XRP army people a lot of XRP people are going there and and talking with them and they they understand they understand the game fully so that is at the link in the description and I will now get back to talking about what is going on in these markets, what is going on in the world. I appreciate all of you for being here and sitting with me through that. I'm super excited for that. Thanks, guys. So, here we are. Another big thing that we haven't talked about just yet today is the dollar index. Okay, so the dollar index is on the rise. And when we think about it, the dollar index and oil are very likely to move in congruence with one another. Okay? So we might actually start to see some sustained movement for oil. Okay. I clicked the link myself. It seems that it's working just fine. But I did see your um your comment there. So oil and the dollar tend to move in congruence with one another. And this is a big piece of what people are talking about with this whole thing. It's like um in fact, Professor Chang in one of these videos that I have pulled up, he really really breaks this down super well. So, I'm actually going to let him talk about that a little bit better because essentially um the whole petro dollar system, which we've talked about on this channel before, is built off of the fact that once the United States came off of uh the gold standard, thank you CJ Jones for the super chat. Very much appreciated. Once the United States came off the gold standard, the way that the US still maintained dominance of uh their hedgeimony of their currency was by basically going out to the Gulf region and saying, "Hey, we will protect you guys. We'll have our naval fleet in the area and because of that, you guys are only going to buy our oil in US dollars." Okay? Okay. And so, let me go ahead and uh bring it back to Professor Chang really fully breaking down why what's happening right now is threatening uh that relationship and what this could mean for the future of the US dollar. Let's get into this real quick here. >> All right. So, the game plan is this. You have to destroy the GCC. Why >> the GCC is the Gulf Coast countries? Because GCC is the lynch pin of the American empire. >> And let me let me fully break that. The Gulf Coast countries are on the west side, right? That southwestern side of the straight of Hormuz. Okay, so we were just looking at that earlier. Okay, you got Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahin, oops, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman. Okay. And then you have Iran on the other side of that. So just wanted to make sure that you understood that because otherwise it can be a little confusing. So what the GC does is it sells oil. Sells oil and then for US dollars. What does it put US dollars? It puts US dollars into the American stock market. All right. So this this is investments of the UAE. Okay. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait into the US financial markets. As you can see, from 2012 up to today, it's been exploding. All right? Because the US financial markets is one of the safest places where you can put your money. The intention is this. The intention is, hey, if I cut off oil and these countries no longer have access to US dollars, they're forced to spend whatever resources they have on protecting themselves. Okay? And then guess what happens? The stock market collapses. The summer collapses. The stock market is the real growth engine of the US economy. The entire US economy collapses with it. All right. There are about maybe seven companies in uh America that accounts for about a quarter of stock market growth. Okay, these seven countries, these seven uh companies of course are are AI companies. Nvidia, um um Microsoft, Google, Apple. Okay, these are the companies but and then these companies are heavily invested in by the GCC nations. So if these nations are no longer able to invest in the stock market, these companies will collapse in value and with that that would lead to economic depression in America. Okay? Does that make sense? All right. So that is the situation for today. Today was just an over. So once again to just do a quick overview there, the Gulf Coast countries sell their oil to the world, but they only accept US dollars. They take those US dollars and they park those US dollars in the form of a US company such as Google, Microsoft, Fang, Magnificent 7 or right in US treasuries. Okay. So, there's both of those two things to consider when this entire thing is going down. It's like, well, if these if these countries aren't first off able to really get their oil out, if they're not making the money, right, then they can't take that money and put it into the US stock market. And so, this is a big concern for the value of the dollar. Really, the the the value of the dollar is a reserve currency asset. And the entire concept, the petro dollar system is at stake right here, right now. And so and yeah, so for anyone also if you weren't aware, uh we did an episode on Professor Jang on memes and markets just um what was I saying just yesterday and that was a really fun episode. We broke down a lot of his theories kind of how he got to this point and whatnot. So if you ever if you haven't already gotten to memes and markets, you got to go over here and hit that subscribe button. We go live every Tuesday and Thursday and every once in a while we'll do a surprise episode like we did yesterday. And uh this is a really good episode. It's a lot of fun. We just kind of go through some of those videos and go more in depth on like who is Professor Jen exactly and how did he get to rise to such prominence in such a short period of time. So definitely check out memes and markets as always. That is my absolute baby project and I'm excited about that one. But now back to the the scheduled programming here. Uh one of the big things that has been happening in the United States is the US is actually going ahead and starting to lift sanctions. So the big problem here is that Europe, right, has relied upon uh Russia for oil for quite some time. But once the Russia Ukraine war started, the US started to say, "Hey, wait a minute. You're not like why would you keep buying your oil from Russia? they're gonna take over Ukraine with all the money that you're funding them with. Right? So, you're all upset about what's happening in Ukraine, but you're funding them. You're buying all of their oil. And so, the idea has been to get them to stop buying oil from Russia. And the United States is also like, we're defending, we're sending so much resources and spending so much money to defend Europe and to help Europe, yet you guys just keep buying the oil from Russia. So, why are we helping you if you're buying all of Russia's oil? you're literally just funding your oppressor in this regard. And so with that said, um, Donald, excuse me, what am I saying? So with that said, now that Russia, right, has been cut off. They've also, the US has implemented sanctions on them as well, right? They said, "Look, if you buy oil from Russia, then we're just going to sanction you, right? We're going to stop allowing you to get access to our dollars and into our system." And so, but now what's happened is that well the whole world is short about 20% of its oil supply and Russia tends to have cheap oil and so the concern becomes well where are we all going to get our oil from and Treasury Secretary Scott Besson has said well because of what's happening here we might have to actually lift some of these sanctions on Russian oil and they're doing it in a very specific way but let's go ahead and hear a little bit of Scott Bessent the Treasury Secretary of the United States talk about the situation >> the world is very well supplied in oil. Uh yesterday, Treasury agreed to let our allies in India start buying Russian oil that was already on the water. Uh the Indians had been very good actors. We had asked them to stop buying sanctioned Russian oil this fall. They did. They were going to substitute it with US oil. uh but to uh e ease the uh temporary gap of oil around the world uh we have given them permission to accept the Russian oil we may unsanction other Russian oil you know the the the other thing Treasury can so that's an important thing that he just said there because at first it was just we'll let all of these oil tankers that are just stranded in the ocean you can buy that Russian oil but in this statement statement right here. He's actually pivoted and said, "Well, we might actually also allow you to buy other Russian oil, too. >> We may unsanction other Russian oil." The the the other thing Treasury can do here, Larry, is there are hundreds of millions of sanctioned barrels of sanctioned crude on the water. And in essence, by unsanctioning them, Treasury can create supply. And we we are looking at that. We're going to uh keep a cadence of announcing measures uh to bring relief to the market during during this conflict. And Larry, I'm I'm sure you agree with me that in our investment careers, the best investment you made was looking to the other side. And the other side here is that the once this is over, then oil prices are going to be sustainably lower and the in a safer position for years if not decades to come. So I would encourage people to look to the other side of this. >> So um a lot of clapback from this statement. People are saying, "Oh, really?" Yeah. Josh Young, the same guy. Wow, he's pulling up on the feed today. I didn't really realize that. He said, "What if we just tell everyone that the oil market is well supplied?" [laughter] I thought that was pretty good. Um because uh obviously, right, >> the world is very well. >> None of this would be in question if the world was so well supplied with oil. Then why are we lifting the sanctions on Russia all of a sudden? So anyways, uh this is kind of one of the major developments there is that even Russia is going to potentially start to benefit from this and that is going to be something to keep an eye on. Let me tell you. So in terms of like what are the different things to be thinking about what to do about what's going on here? There are oil sensitive sectors that are going to be hit by this and a lot of those are going to be things in transportation logistics kind of world. You're talking about airlines, shipping, trucking, chemicals, and agriculture which are going to face higher input costs as the price of oil continues to spike. Uh we saw some headlines around like airline tickets are about to start going up way higher. So that that's one of the things that's going to be hit by what's happening. inflation is very likely to occur in this time. Scott Bessant, he just said it's not going to occur. Oil prices are going to come down really fast is what he just said. But once again, like that all depends on how long this war actually goes on or how long the straight of Hormuse in particular is going to be closed and whether or not there's going to be some solution found to what that's going to look like. And if that is not found, if there is not a solution and the straight of her hormuse stays stuck for anything more than just a week even, uh things are going to start to really heat up in the oil markets and that's going to create inflation around the entire world. So there's also all this conversation around like, oh well it doesn't matter we don't import our oil from the Gulf States. That doesn't matter. Oil trades at a global price and the and the US does import the oil that it actually uses from other places. It's a it's a global phenomenon when it comes to the price of oil. Okay? So, you can't just be like, "Oh, well, it doesn't matter because we don't uh we don't import our oil from the Middle East." Like, brother, that's just simply not exactly how it works. Okay? So, moving forward here, um inflation hedges, right? There's uh even treasury inflation protected securities. So, treasuries that protect for inflation. You have commodities like gold, okay, which are often going to rise during energy shocks. Silver or other things that might continue to do well in these types of environments. Now, we talked about the equities that are downstream of oil, but then you got to think back to the the origins of it, right? So, the actual oil producers themselves are very likely to continue to benefit from higher oil prices. You've got Exxon, you've got Chevron, you've got Marathon, XLE being the major one that is just an ETF that's a basket of all of these types of companies. Very likely to continue to perform throughout this environment if we can see that this continues. Now, the big problem here though is that we're going to probably see a negative shock in the markets before any of that really continues to play out. Uh we've seen very small signs of volatility in the markets continuing to rise. Okay. And the biggest the biggest thing that we were just talking about this week as well, we got the jobs report on Friday, is that the labor market is weakening. So, the Federal Reserve here is about to run out of tools. Okay? The Fed can either lower rates or hike rates. And the whole thing that we've been waiting on is for lower interest rates. Lower interest rates and more stimulus to come into the markets because of some sort of a problem. Well, there is a big chance that the United States is going to have to create money to go out and fund this war if it continues and drags on the way that it is very likely to. And with that being the case, there's going to need to be some sort of a place where that money is coming from. The big beautiful bill does account for an increase in defense spending. So, there is legislation that has crossed the finish line that will allow for increased defense spending over the next year and a half or so. But when it comes to um where we're at now, we talked a few months ago, I think it was a couple months ago, where Trump was talking about we need to increase the defense budget to 1.5 trillion, right? Like that might be closer to what needs to happen, okay? In order for all of this to actually work out. But my point was the labor market is getting worse and worse. Okay? When we look at the numbers in the labor market, they're continuing to weaken and we're consistently getting revisions to the downside. Right. So, we keep on getting told that, oh, no, don't worry about the jobs market. Everything's fine. But every single time we get a new jobs number, we're also getting revisions from the previous number saying that it was much lower than we had expected. Let me go ahead and zoom in a little bit so you guys can see. Uh, this is the general trend of the non-farm employment change. Just imagine jobs being added to the economy, right? We're seeing that. This is back from 2021ish. And you can see how that has just continued to fall and fall and fall and fall. Okay? And at this point, we're starting to get negative reads. We're starting to lose jobs in the economy. Okay? And we're getting revisions that the previous announcements that were made were wronged and that there were fewer jobs added in the previous uh announcements as well. So, not only is this the trend, but apparently it's way worse than we're being told when the initial data comes out. So this is another big problem in the United States is the labor market is weakening at the same time that all of this is going on. And so if the Fed tries to uh the problem here is that the economy is weakening. So the the Fed could just lower rates, right? Okay, lower rates, try to spur more investment and be cool. But now we've got this oil problem happening where inflation might start to come in. So if they try to lower rates into an inflationary environment, you can very easily overheat the economy. Okay? and that's obviously not what you want to see. So, I just wanted to point that out as well as this is the other side of the of the conversation here is the job market activity. Now, with all of that said, uh I'll play a quick clip from Kathy Woods talking about uh the jobs situation as well, and then from there, we'll move into Q&A and break down anything else that anyone wants to chat about. So Kathy Woods uh Kathy Woods is the manager of an ETF family called ARC and ARC uh had its moment back a few years ago where they were kind of like oh we're coming out and uh leading the way in terms of innovation. Um this was during the at the end of 2020 she kind of had her moment and they had this huge run up. they were big owners of Tesla uh and other high tech stocks like that and then they've had this massive fall and this is just the ARC Innovation ETF in particular and ever since then they've had a massive fall in the price of that ETF and it's continued to kind of do its thing uh since then but uh Kathy Woods is the manager of this fund family and she has incredible thoughts regardless of the fund performance itself a lot of people uh oh I got to show a meme about that that's actually hilarious Um um oh man I got to hold on I got to do this because this is so much fun. Uh real quick real quick. So there's this concept going on right now because Chimath Palipatia uh came out and basically told his investors they were like look uh you lost money you should be happy I gave you a capital loss that you can refund your taxes. And so, Investing Visuals has come out and said, uh, they they've made this concept of a a graphic that says capital losses as a service. And let me tell you, that's that's pretty dang funny. I know this isn't memes and markets, but that is hilarious. Uh, capital loss as a service, part two, Kathy Wood. But aside from that, she has incredible thoughts that she's going to share with us right here. And, um, I highly recommend uh, paying attention to some of the things that she talks about. Uh, the fun performance is a totally different conversation, but here we go. is under attack. Uh part of that access is under attack and the US are going along so the various bond markets are not they've been a little volatile over the last week but they haven't they haven't capitulated uh you have a down day and an up market in just a second. It's because this kind of news is leaking out uh and I think it's very positive. Um, so now before we go into the charts, what I'd like to do is it is employment Friday and to be honest, uh, the the government's employment statistics are becoming pretty useless. So it's kind of hilarious that we started doing this because of employment Friday. Nonetheless, they affect the markets and, uh, over time, I think that that impact will diminish because these numbers are revised down or up, but mostly recently down. Now, what's so interesting is, uh, non-farm payroll employment dropped 92,000. it was supposed to be up 55,000 based on all of the other employment indicators out there which are all pointing up. So the ISM uh index employment uh indicators for both the manufacturing and service uh sectors uh initial claims are quesuscent uh and just ADP reports have come now they're reporting weekly and they've been up every week and so this Bureau of Labor Statistics report is is beginning to look a little ridiculous. Um, we mentioned during the last uh in the no that last year the non-farm payroll employment numbers were revised down for the year uh for by 865,000. That took away employment gains for many months uh when we thought employment was stronger than expected. It took those numbers way down. Now, there is another uh statistic. It's called household employment. Uh that comes out on the same day. It's more reliable. It includes many more small businesses. And uh it too was down. it was down uh I believe 185,000. Now there was the Kaiser Permanente strike uh that impacted both and uh there was very bad weather. Uh so that's absolutely a consideration as well. Um but it does seem that employment is being revised down regularly including last month. I think the if I'm not mistaken the downward revision was 69,000 uh for the last two months. So you know it it is getting to be kind of ridiculous. Um, but the household employment number rarely is revised. They do, I think it's a a five-year revision, but they do revisions quite infrequently. Uh, and that number was revised down by 1.4 million jobs uh for last year. Uh, now it corroborates what we've been thinking. These downward revisions are partly a function of productivity growth being much higher uh than expected. And uh so what what does it mean? GDP really is not being revised. So when you revise down employment in order to get the same amount of GDP, productivity has to have increased. >> So just a little bit of a take on what's happening with these jobs numbers, right? And what that all means and what that is all about. So yeah. Yeah. People don't like Kathy. Kathy is a broken clock. Well, you know, the reason I brought what she said up there is because it really has nothing to do with her. It has to do with the reality of the situation with the jobs market report and how it's losing credibility even for someone who has already lost credibility herself, right? But um yeah, so anyways, at this point, like I said, the Fed's in a pickle. They can't lower rates. If they lower rates, they could play into this inflation problem. Last year was because of the tariffs. Oh, we don't know what's going to happen with the tariffs. We can't lower rates. Okay. Well, now you got a oil spike. You got a whole war in the Middle East. Now you can't lower rates. what are we going to do? Uh we'll see in May uh when you get a new Fed chair in place, but it's going to be really hard to get people in alignment with the idea of lowering rates, especially if you have a war going on. So, with all of that said, um I mean, not too much has really changed on the thesis of what comes next here. The only other thing that I guess I haven't talked about yet was the whole XRP situation. So, uh Jake Claver has his domino theory. It's this huge thing where um the world is going to come to this place where it needs liquidity and XRP will be the answer to that liquidity and how it's needed. I won't go in depth on that today. We talk about it in the channel members section. But um as of right now, this XRP asset is continuing to fall with the rest of Bitcoin and everything else, right? All these cryptos are probably going to continue to fall throughout this war scenario and in fact throughout the bare market that we're in at this moment. And so, yeah, someone said, uh, Denaman said, "It's not the person, it's the knowledge that it transmits and share." Yeah, I'll always have that perspective of, you know, we we've got people that are super smart that have made poor decisions and so on and have lessons also to share with us as they learn. And we're all people here out here learning and making mistakes. It's definitely something that I've learned over the past eight months of doing this YouTube channel. But um so XRP is coming down and uh Bitcoin is coming down. The first thing that was in XRP domino theory from Jay Claver was oil spiking. And he's been talking about this for a couple years, right? Um we've got at least that first piece is oil spiking. The next thing that he mentioned was that this would have to lead to uh Japan basically needing to hike rates because of inflation in their economy getting too high. Once Japan starts to hike rates, the reverse carrier trade needs to unwind and then once that happens, the entire system can kind of get to a place to where there needs to be some injection of liquidity. So with all that said, oil has spiked. That's the first piece of the domino theory down. With all of this in place, my major thing is what am I doing personally guys? The whole point was what's the thesis now? Nothing has really really changed. One thing that is changing is that the prices of risk assets and really just crypto at this point are going down. Whereas the prices of things like gold and silver are continuing to go up. Now when we really think about that, what could be the asymmetric opportunity in an environment like that? Well, it could be right to start to allocate towards the things that are going down. Now, this is all about you and you know, none of this is financial advice. I'm just a random guy on the internet talking to a wall. There is no uh right answer for everyone. But what there is is asymmetric opportunities. And for me, right, just the other day, what am I doing? I'm continuing to DCA into the assets that I believe in in the crypto space and when I'm really feeling like there's a good discount, I'm going to buy. You know what I'm saying? I'm going to take a little bit of extra cash. I'm going to buy. You know what I mean? That's just me. That's just what I'm doing. Not recommending anybody do anything. Um, so you've got the three different time frames that we've talked about in the past. You've got the tactical time frame, couple weeks to a month at a time. You've got the C the cyclical time frame that might be all the way from six months to two years, four years. And then you've got the secular time frame of what's happening on the longer term, 10, 20 years, decades ahead. What's happening? I truly do think that what's happening with gold is a secular trend. I think we're at the beginning of a secular trend for what happens with gold here. The United States dollar is going to have to have a response to the fact that countries are uh get going away from that. And I do believe that there will be some sort of incorporation of what's happening with digital assets into that. Whether that's the case or not doesn't really matter because you also have a secular move in what's happening with cryptocurrency. Crypto has been around since 2009. Okay, we are a little bit less than 20 years into that phenomenon and the price has only gone in that time in one direction which is up. So when you get moments where you're in the middle of a secular move that is that is higher right and you get an opportunity where you have a cyclical which we're let's imagine we're in a bare market for crypto that's lower then those become the opportune times to allocate towards those things right as you go through that cyclical bear and back up into the cyclical bull. So, um, I'm going to open the floor for questions as we talk about what is coming next here, what is on your guys' minds. Let me know. And with that, also, I will remind everyone that I just announced today a partnership with Caleb and Brown, which is something that I'm super excited about. They are by far uh the best crypto brokerage in terms of you pick up the phone, you talk to someone. Guys, you know how rare that is? You know how hard it is to get in touch with Coinbase, y'all. You can't pick up the phone and get on the phone with Coinbase, okay? And um and that is why I'm just so excited about Caleb and Brown. And like I said, guys, I spent months talking to these guys because I was like, I don't know, like let me make sure 100% that this is something I believe in. And I did that and this is where we're at. And on top of that, you can literally also email my guy Jim. Uh if you just have any questions, you just want to say, "Hey, like I've got some questions. I just want to set up a time or figure something out like let me talk to you Jim and I put the email and the link to go ahead and sign up for Caleb and Brown in the description of this video. So, while you guys' questions are coming in, just wanted to let you guys know that I have officially signed a partnership with Caleb and Brown and I truly believe in what they offer. Um, you've got personalized brokers, you got a fixed fee for your trades, all this, you got all all the good assets are there, right? You don't have to worry about that. Oh, and another big thing is they have no limits. So, this is another really big thing cuz when when crypto does go up, if it goes up, not a fortune teller. One of the biggest problems that people run into is that when you have one exchange, this is why I always tell you got to have multiple exchanges. You got a multiple exchanges, multiple hardware wallets, multiple ways of storing your crypto. Okay? Because what happens is is for instance on on Coinbase, you're going to have a limit of how much you can withdraw from there at a time. And so what you're going to have to do is once a day withdraw the maximum amount from Coinbase that you can or right have multiple exchanges that you spread everything out across and use the maximum amount that you can withdraw from those exchanges every day. Or you can be super hyperprepared and have a certain amount of your crypto assets that are on Caleb and Brown where they have no limits for how much you can deposit and withdraw at any one time. And that's also the important of being able to pick up the phone and say, "Hey yo, my guy, like we this is the move that we need to make. Hey, or hey, what is the move that I should make?" Right? Depending upon your kind of style of how you'd like to develop that relationship with your broker over at Caleb and Brown. So anyways, just wanted to make sure that you guys were aware of this partnership. Uh you can find a link in the description to sign up to Caleb and Brown. I will also have it as a pin comment after this video. So let's go ahead and see what's going on in the chat. some of the questions that you guys are asking. Okay. So, what do I think about altcoins for example Cardano and Salana? Well, I mean all crypto is going to continue to go down at this particular moment. What do I think of them as actual uh investment opportunities? um or as technologies I guess rather is is how I would reframe the other side of the of the question. Uh Cardano has done an incredible job of building out a proper consensus mechanism. Now if you guys know me, I'm not the person to really choose a particular blockchain. Right? When it comes to blockchains, uh the they're all going to be in a sense they're kind of commoditized. Now, it's a weird thing to say because every single blockchain is different. It's so unique, but the service that they're offering of being able to use it to get transactions across the line kind of gets commoditized when you can send value across the internet without a centralized counterparty. But now when it comes to the major thing that's not commoditized is the scalability and the security of the blockchain. So Bitcoin is supposed to be the most secure blockchain, right? It is. It's the most secure network in the world, right? And that's something that you can't trade for something else. And when you're thinking about um something like um Cardano, that's one of the things that they've done differently than Bitcoin, but they've also taken a really long time to get right in terms of how to get a secure platform that is not a proofof work platform that is overly energyintensive. So when I think about like the massive blockchains that are built to operate at scale, I do think that what Cardano has done with their consensus mechanism is really really interesting. Now when you compare that to something like Salana, which is all about speed and scalability, but without the security or the uptime, right? I really look at Salana, I'm going be honest with you guys. I look at Salana as like a it's like a toy. Like it's like a it's like it's like a McLaren. I don't know if you guys are car people, but McLaren's are notorious for breaking down as soon as you pull it off the lot, right? So, it's fast and it'll win a race, but it's also going to break down really fast. And that's kind of exactly how I look at Sena. It's not really I don't even take it seriously. Not to say that I don't take McLaren seriously. McLaren, if you ever want to sponsor the stream, let me know. I I'll wear a cap. But um you know, just saying that's kind of how I look at Salon. I I I almost look at it as just like a a really well done marketing campaign for a chain that doesn't even that that constantly goes down. But that's just my own personal take. I also have very rarely used it. And the times that I have tried to use it was always when there was like some hype going on and it wasn't working very well. Just being honest. All right, let's see here. Thank you. What a sell and congratulations on the collaboration. Yeah, I'm super excited about it. Thank you. What do I think about paper versus physical silver? Yeah, I mean guys, it's the same it's the same equation. It's always the same thing. It's diversify your holdings, right? And the way that I was talking to someone about this the other day is like when you buy these precious metals, when you buy precious metals, when you buy a physical precious metal, there's a different kind of mentality that you should have around it, right? Because I'm buying physical gold, physical silver, and I'm putting it in a safe or whatever. that gold, that silver is not really there to be sold at any point in time, right? That gold and silver is tucked away and is a part of my wealth. Kind of like how people buy a home and they sit in their house. They just you just sit in the house. Now, obviously, you can sell your house. A lot of people sell their their house, but it's not meant to be a vehicle of like you're not going out to the market every day or to the grocery store and like spending equity in your house, right? And I think that's kind of a different way of looking at your physical gold and silver as well. And then on the other hand, your paper silver is like if you went out and you bought shares of a real estate ETF, it's the same thing where actually, yeah, I'm not sitting on those real estate ETFs like it's my house or an apartment building that I bought. Instead, it's sitting there like uh an ETF that I can buy and sell and get out of as I need to. So I think you diversify your holdings across different different offerings uh across different exposure to the asset. Uh and in and another way is right cash flows off of the asset, right? So to make that comparison again, you know, buying a home to sit in is not really an investment. Okay, I want to be clear that's not really an investment if you're going to live in your home. Okay, it's a place to park money, but it's not a cash flowing investment, and it becomes a liability when you have to repair anything that breaks down. Conversation for another day. To all my older folks in here, don't get mad at me. [gasps] Um, when it comes to looking at the difference between that and buying a real estate ETF which cash flows and pays dividends, right? That's the difference between also having let's say uh uh physical gold and silver or owning a minor, right? that cash flows and pays dividends off of also getting the appreciation that comes with the price of oil going up and down. Excuse me, my goodness, gold going up or down. So, the the the point that I'm trying to make is that there's different ways to think about diversification in this realm. It's obviously physical versus paper. It's different types of paper. It's also stock and equity and cash flows that you can get from the same asset or underlying commodity that you're trying to get exposure to, right? So hopefully that made some sense there. Let me see the chat. Let me see the chat, brothers and sisters. Yes. So uh someone asked what are the fees? What is the cost of Caleb Brown? So to set up an account, it's totally free. Set up an account is totally free. Uh, the fees I believe it's 3.5% flat fee on every transaction. I think that's what it is. Let me make sure. Yeah. So, the cool thing about that is that it's upfront and that's what they do, right? They don't have all these hidden fees. They don't charge you uh spreads like a lot of exchanges will do. And so when activity hypes up, the spreads get wider. So you end up paying more and that is undefined cuz spreads can go in unlimited in any direction. But Caleb Brown doesn't do that from what I understand. It's just a flat fee every time. And it's not a super low fee, right? But you also get all the extra services being talked to someone and all of this stuff. And also once again, you can work with them as a place to have a place to go when you want to make transactions to make sure that you have an account that you're verified that you're KYC. That's another thing, guys. Oh my goodness. When you sign up for these exchanges, always KYC. Always KYC immediately because what happens is is people send money to exchanges and then you can't take it off until you KYC. So, always KYC when you get on an exchange. Keith, what are your thoughts on programmable money? How does Iran impact it? And will Kuba be next because of the oil to the Gulf ports in Louisiana? So, uh, there's a lot of talk about Cuba being next, period. Um, I haven't done the research just yet on why that is, but the idea that it has something to do with oil is, uh, fascinating, right? Um, because yes, it's been very clear that Trump is going to do something with Kuba Cinda without a doubt. Um, so and what's happened over there right now, by the way, is they've had these protests in the streets because of the um their electricity has been out for some massive amount of time. So now there's people in the streets protesting in Cuba, which is just undeal. And so that so that situation is going down, right? Um, let's see what else do we got from you guys. Do I think the price of crude oil will incentivize EV production? I think I think the geopolit the geopolitics of what's happening with oil will incentivize EV production, right? Because no one wants to be reliant on one another. I think that alone is more of the the equation here. there's just the war, right? Says, "All right, well, I need to find a way to not be so reliant on oil." Even in the UAE alone, for instance, right, the UAE is saying, "Hey, um, we need to start working on EVs because we don't want to have all of our uh income and revenues based upon oil all of the time." So, that is something that is happening. the world is moving towards EVs as far as building the capability to be able to have electric uh vehicles uh and and and renewable sources that they can use so that they also just don't have to rely on one another. It's it's it's kind of like a part of the ddollarization trend in some ways, right? The de oil trade dollization as well. Let's see. Cardi Eden said, "Thank you, Keith. I appreciate you. I appreciate you. Thank you guys for being here and for spending some time hanging out. It's always fun fun fun. Thoughts on impacts Japan economy will see in the medium-term due to the oil chaos. Yeah. So the big thing is that Japan is heavily reliant upon um the strait for its oil. I think it was like 80% of its oil is coming from the straight of moose. So Japan will very briefly be impacted drastically by what's happening there. From what I did understand, I think they have a nice amount of oil reserves to be fair. So it won't be immediate, but it also won't take long for the impact to be drastic. And this is something that is I think a concern for the entire region of East Asia in general. Let's see. Uh, canig kanigate tech ketta channel. I have diversified so much that I have my own garden in livestock. I love that. I love that so much. That is so cool. Does Bitcoin get a step up in basis? Are you saying does it get a step up in basis for tax purposes? Um any any asset, right? Any asset is going to have the same treatment in that regard. Any any Yeah. Any asset that you have a capital gain or a loss on. I'm not a tax professional. It's not tax advice. Um let's see. Could a physically backed gold or silver ETC decouple from the spot price even though it is backed by allocated metal and investors can claim their shares stored in vault? Absolutely. Johan, could it physically back gold or silver? I'm assuming you mean exchange traded fund or exchange traded product? I haven't seen ETC before. I don't know what the C would be. ETP or an ETF. Decouple from the spot price. Could a physically back gold or silver ETF decouple from the spot price? It's very possible. I mean, this is kind of what some of the hoopla around the dislocation of or the premium that people are paying in certain exchanges and in certain markets for physical silver and gold is all about, right? That kind of is what that is. It's not that the price of the ETFs is like lower than or like going down, but you'll see instead an increase in the price of the spot for the physical metal, right? So you'll see the spread between the physical metal and the spot prices of the ETFs widen. And that in a sense is the same thing as there being that decoupling. Hopefully that made some sense. Where do I leave my keys? That's hilarious. I leave my keys on the key hanger. [laughter] All right. Do you have to pay capital gains on crypto now? I said, "Yes, you do. You do. Absolutely." Uh, not tax advice. I'm not a tax adviser. What is KYC? Oh, wow. Yeah. Uh, KYC is know your customer, which means like when you go onto these exchanges, you have to upload your ID and do that whole process or whatever so that they know who you are and then they can allow you to transact. So, it's by the law that these exchanges have to get that information. Otherwise, they can't allow you to like send money to their exchange and then get it off. And so, that's why I say when you sign up for Caleb and Brown or any other exchange, always do the KYC. It's the first every time I get on exchange, I haven't completed the sign up process until I have done that, right? Because otherwise, what'll happen is is you'll forget, right? So, you'll have signed up for an exchange, but you'll forget that you didn't KYC. And if you didn't KYC and then you send something to it, then you're like, "Oh snap, I got to KYC just" just to get anything off of it. And when the market started getting crazy and like there was a time where Coinbase wasn't able to KYC people for like weeks and like think about that. You send your crypto to an exchange and you need to sell it or you're ready to sell it or whatever and you and you can't because you have to KYC first or you want to pull the assets off even. Let's just say you sold it already, but you need to pull the assets off cuz sometimes you can sell but not pull the assets off. You got to wait weeks, right? Because they're backed up or whatever, which is what happened in Coinbase. I think it was like 2018 or 2017 that happened. Um then it's like, oh, anything can happen throughout that time on your account, anything can happen in the markets, whatever. So I always immediately as soon as I sign up for a crypto exchange I KYC because one you'll just forget and two there might be times where you want to do it and you just can't because the there's a backup and all this kind of stuff. So yeah, thanks for that question. I we say KYC and stuff like that's everyone knows what that is but not everyone has heard that or knows what that means. Why aren't we just using Venezuela oil or our own oil? Well, for now we are. But I guess the question is why do we continue to go out into the world and get more or fight these kinds of wars? Um yeah, I mean it comes down to it's not just about having the oil, it's also having command and control of the trade of it, right? We're starting to see right how oil how how China is highly reliant upon the straight of hormuz right so we're creating a choke point on China's oil Japan gets a lot of its oil from there huge choke point for Japan's oil we've created uh we've put a lot of sanctions on Russia right for their oil sales and so it's it's really not just the oil itself it's also the power right that comes with our people trading oil also in US dollars or Not right because this is this is what a lot of people are speculating is that Iran right not selling their oil in US dollars using other methods to do it is a part of why this whole thing started to break out. What ways can you profit from the war in terms of investments calls puts etc. Well I'm not a financial adviser. This is not financial advice, but um oil is going to provide some interesting situations here when it comes to like things like uh in the options market. What I would say, there's a few things in the options markets that people aren't necessarily aware of. Everyone thinks to buy options. You don't have to buy options to make money in the options market. You can also sell options. Okay. And in this situation, I think um something that might happen is going something that might be an idea is to go long volatility. [snorts] There's ways to use options to not just also bet on price going up or down, but also to bet on prices either staying within a certain range of price or going outside of that range of price. Now, that's an entire lesson for another day. You have several different ways that you can set up those types of strategies. But if you look up how to go long volatility in an asset like oil, that might be something that could be a way to think about opportunities in the market. Going long volatility on oil. Do you think that oil will stay in a tight band in price? You think it'll go in a wider range? I think that's something that we can kind of bet on for me personally rather. Um, let's see folks. Do I think AI will replace macro or event traders soon? Uh, that's coming from Aberk. Abbercrombber kid 1000. Do you think AI will replace macro event traders soon? No, I don't personally, but maybe I'm super biased. Uh, I don't think so. I think that there's a lot of emotional aspects of this that are constantly playing out in the markets and I think because of that, um, there there will probably always be room for discretionary and even just people who are trading these events. Um, 960 Liz said, "If you ever show Josh Young again, especially as an expert, I'll unsubscribe. Mr. Global has all your answers. Who's Mr. Global and what did Josh Young do that was so wrong. I'm actually curious. I have no idea. Mr. Global, thank you for putting me on to that. I haven't seen him before. I'll go ahead and check him out. He's clearly an oil guy or at least he's talking about what's going on right now. So, check him out. Okay. tone stake said by 960 list u yeah I'm curious as to what he did are we even using Venezuelan oil while Iran is restricting oil exports through Hormuz I think that's actually a really good question that's one I don't have the answer to right like we've apparently taken command of the Venezuelan oil but like what is actually going on there right because I haven't seen any updates about that what cell said what do you think of MSTR and STR strategy. Um, MSTR and strategy. Yeah, you know, I've never been a huge fan of a leveraged play on Bitcoin, right? I think Bitcoin is leveraged enough, my friends. I really don't think you need a leveraged equity on Bitcoin. And the reason I add that word leveraged equity, right, is because it's already so far disconnected from Bitcoin. It's already really a bunch of debt that you're buying. and then you're buying in equity. So, as the company goes bankrupt, you lose everything. And it's like, well, that's kind of silly when the whole point of Bitcoin is that you don't want to have to deal with um that kind of a risk. There's no counterparty, right? That's the whole point of Bitcoin. Now, listen, uh there's different ways to use your portfolio. Bitcoin has its own place in the portfolio. And obviously, you don't replace your Bitcoin with MSTR, right? It's not what I guess is being asked of anyone to buy macro strategy, but uh macro strategy. But uh that's uh that's my take. Like I've never touched it with a 10-ft pole. I just thought that it was kind of silly. I don't get it. But I mean, I'm also just not, you know, like that financial wizard. A lot of people who are financial wizards, who are engineers, like smart people, they buy it. I I think it's just fundamentally a dumb offering. Why would I give you my money to go out and buy Bitcoin for me with a bunch of debt? Why wouldn't I just buy Bitcoin? And if I want a leveraged bet on Bitcoin, then I would buy a leveraged Bitcoin ETF, not not Micro Strategy. Uh but I don't know, maybe I'm there's definitely something about this that I overlook, right? Maybe um maybe it's not that simple. More monkey business. 589. Yeah, he he definitely did do that. [laughter] I'm dead. Um Bob Franklin 5335 said, "A friend of mine had to wait over a month for Coinbase to let him move his phones." Yeah. Yeah. It sucks because you also can't really get in touch with him very easily. And that sucks. like when I'm dealing with assets that like can't be um uh like gotten [clears throat] back like you know if you do something wrong and all that like I I would like to be able to talk to someone and I just think that it's and none of them do that you know what I mean no none of these exchanges do that Caleb and Brown is a full-on brokerage where you can actually talk to someone I think that's super cool minus said does Caleb and Brown custody our coins yes they are custo custodial exchange and they work with Fireblocks uh to basically uh manage the custody process. Right? So it is a custodial exchange fully custodial exchange and they have institutional grade cold storage with Fireblocks which is the industry sort of leading um custody providers. And that's that's another big thing about them is that they're all about security, right? Because of the fact that you've got someone that you can talk to and all of this. There's tons of different security uh protocols that they have in place to make sure that you're always safe with them. Let's see. And what is the benefits from using Caleb and Brown? So, um, a lot of the things that I've already talked about, I won't I won't keep talking about it too much, but you've got someone that you can talk to. So, that depends on who you are. You might not need that. You might not want that, right? I know a lot of my people that are watching this are either kind of newer to the game or also just would like to have that kind of experience. I mean, how cool is it to have someone to actually talk about your money with without having to pay some crazy amount of money to have some financial adviser or whatever. And how many of those people who are financial advisors and whatnot, what do they know about crypto, right? So, these are people that are deep in the game. They help people with cold storage. They help people with like all these different things. Like, you know, imagine you have an actual expert that you could talk to who might know more than me, right? about what you are doing with your assets and whatnot. So that's one of the major things that I think is what makes them unique. Um but then on top of that, it's also the fee structure, right? So instead of having to worry about spreads widening on you, you've got a fixed amount that you're going to pay whenever and you also have no withdrawal limits. Those are some of the biggest things. And in this day and age, everyone's always asking me about what do you think about this exchange, what do you think about this exchange? And I'm like, the first thing I want to know is how long have they been around and have they been around through all the different bare markets that we've seen? And Caleb and Brown has been around since 2016 and they've continued to um be helpful throughout all of that time. So that's those are the main things I would say is really having that whites white glove experience. Why is there such a terrible narrative about renewable energy in the United States? Um, I think, well, I don't know. I mean, I guess part of it is like where is the money being made? Uh, oil and gas. Um, yeah, I think that's a big part of it. Johan, Johan, we can answer those types of questions inside the channel memberships. I don't mind that. Talk about that a little bit more in there. Um, does USA have strategic or reserves? Yeah, we went over that a little bit earlier in the episode or in this live stream rather. We talked about uh the strategic petroleum reserve that came out after the 1973 oil embargo in 1975. Yeah, we do. Uh but it's not that much, right? It's um it's enough for 35 days essentially is what we we came to the conclusion of. How do I feel about the Algarand blockchain? I think we've talked about it once before. I'm not a huge fan of individual blockchains in general. I'm hugely not a huge fan of that. There was something else that we talked about with Algarand uh I think last week or maybe two weeks ago that was unique to me. Um it was it was news to me. They have cool partnerships. I remember one of the guys in the chat talked about that with like the United States military and whatnot. I think there was something else about them that I missed that was like important as well. Okay, Minis 3113 again. What is the difference between Caleb and Brown and exchange like Robin Hood? Main difference is that we're talking cryptofocused for one. Robin Hood's everywhere. They do everything, which is fine. Um, I personally don't use Robin Hood. I don't trust Robin Hood. And they they lost not even just my trust, but just the credibility with the move that they made back with the GameStop scenario. personally. That's just my personal thing. I don't have anything against them. Um, and for Caleb and Brown, um, you can talk to someone. Once again, guys, none of none of these like larger exchanges and brokers, they really don't often allow you to talk to them like that, but that's the whole service, right, that Caleb Brown is offering. I'm not sure that you can't talk to Robin Hood. I'm sure you can. They're an actual SEC registered broker, so I'm sure you can, but it's just very different. And what do they know about crypto, right? Probably very little. Let's see. All right, folks. [clears throat] Maybe I'm like way behind. Yeah, I am behind. Okay, cool. No, I caught up. All right, guys. How do I think the emerging markets will play out? Yeah, I think the emerging markets um well, we've seen them perform relatively well throughout just the past year where we've had this like uh uh end of American sort of dominance trade or whatever it's called. End of American exceptionalism was the terms that were being used. We've seen the emerging markets continue to perform even uh like I think Venezuela stock market like soared once they took the the president out of the of the country. But um a lot of that also has to do with the decline of the dollar and we have to look at that relative right like uh is the gains that we're seeing in these emerging markets economies actually outpacing the inflationary uh the inflation of their currencies that they're facing and things like that. Um which in some cases they are. I just I have a lot of troubles. The problem is this. America has all the tech. like there's no competing with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, you know, you you know what I'm saying? Like you can't compete with that. So in that regard, a lot of the money and the investment capital that's going to flow throughout the world is not going to stop coming to the US. That's one thing that the US can kind of use as a as a huge kind of thing that it has against every country, you can't compete with that part. That's already been done, the groundwork for that's been laid over the past 20, 30 years. So when it comes to trying to make an equity investment or a risk investment, that's very different than the Treasury situation, right? I might not want to hold your treasuries, but I might kind of have to because I want to have access to US dollars and I need those dollars to go out and buy your companies. So, in that regard, I don't know that that other countries will will be able to meaningfully outperform American markets over the next decade and a half or two, three, four, five. I I don't think that ever it'll be very easy to outperform the American equities markets. So, I don't know. You know, that's just my personal take on that. But anyways guys, um, let me see. If you haven't already, you got to subscribe to the live show that I do with Ben Levit. We're continuing to have so much fun and in fact getting cooler and cooler guests on. You might have missed. We had uh Charles Hoskinson on a couple weeks ago or a week and a half ago. Uh, we just had Leonard Olrich on who apparently you guys know pretty well or at least a lot of his guys also know me which is super super cool. And then we had Django on the other day and he's a lot of fun. He does a lot of talk and commentary around what's going on in the culture and just a super cool guy. So that was a lot of fun. And then we just recently did an episode on who is Professor Jang. We didn't have him on just yet, but we will in the future. So definitely go and subscribe to memes and markets. You can find the link in the description of this video to go ahead and subscribe to memes and markets. And as I mentioned a couple times throughout the stream, I just started a new partnership with Caleb and Brown. So, uh, these guys are the premier crypto brokerage. I saw someone asked, "What if I'm not in the US?" Well, even if you're outside the US, I believe you can still access Caleb and Brown. So, definitely sign up. They are in the US, in Australia, at least, and in some other countries as well. So, check them out. You can click the link in the description to sign up. It's totally free. open up a free account, do your KYC, upload your ID, identify yourself with them so that you can use the full service and you can you'll very quickly be reached out by a broker uh and then after that also you can always reach out to them whenever you have questions whenever you have stuff that you want to talk about. So Keith D and Caleb Brown connecting there. Um and like I said, Jim Bazani is my contact there. He's been super helpful throughout this entire process. Like I said, he's been talking to me for months, making sure that um I felt super comfortable with the way that we were going to go about this. So, you can check out uh his email in the link in the description as well. So, if you just want to talk to him, say, "Hey, like I'm curious about this, like what can you tell me about the the rates, how does this all work, what do I need to do, this and that, and like have someone to really talk to and run walk you through the process." Just shoot Jim an email and just say, "Hey, Keith sent me wanted to get some uh information about Caleb and Brown." So that email is also in the description of this video. It's jim.bazani b- a zz a n i caleb and brown.com. Fantastic everybody. Yep. I appreciate you all and I'm excited for this week ahead. And if you haven't already, you got to make sure to hit that like button and subscribe. Make today the best day of your life, folks. Until next time. Peace. I was trying to put my face on. Until next time. No, no, no. I'm not I'm not going to end this until I get this right. Hold on. How do I change it? pay.

Create your Free Account at Caleb & Brown: https://www.calebandbrown.com/affiliates/keithd/ Get in touch with Jim via email for any questions: jim.bazzani@calebandbrown.com 📹 Become a Channel Member (Exclusive Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAFqzhDwJd12pBDgdk-2GqA/join 📖 Or Join My Patreon (Weekly Newsletter): https://www.patreon.com/c/theinneroperator/ 🎙️Subscribe to Memes and Markets: https://www.youtube.com/@MemesandMarketsPod For a 1:1 conversation, book your paid consultation here: https://calendly.com/keithsmithspeaks All Sponsorship & Business Enquiries: keithdenterprise@gmail.com