C (2:22)

With TaxAct, you can file your business taxes any way you'd like. You can do them by yourself with step by step guidance. You can file with help from a credentialed tax expert when you have questions, or you can upload your documents and an expert will prepare and file for you.

B (2:36)

Just head to taxact.com business-returns to get started. That's taxact.com/business-returns the US Iran cease fire looks as fragile as a Jenga tower with two bots bottom bricks missing. But at least on Wall street, they were celebrating like the war is on the way out. Stocks popped off yesterday after President Trump said on Tuesday that he would postpone attacks on Iran's infrastructure and later agreed to a pause in hostilities with Tehran. The Dow gained 1300 points its best day since April 2025, while the S&P rose 2.5% and the Nasdaq 2.8%. Oil prices, which have surged since the war began five weeks ago, plunged 16% in their biggest one day drop since the pandemic. Diesel and natural gas prices also fell on the hopes that chip traverse the Strait of Hormuz and clear up a bottleneck that's delivered the biggest oil shock the world has ever seen. Here's the but the strait doesn't appear to be open because in the aftermath of the cease fire, Iran has only tightened its grip on the key waterway. According to S and P Global Market Intelligence, just four ships were allowed to pass through on Wednesday, compared to 100 to 120 before the war. Meanwhile, Iran said it closed the strait again after accusing the US of violating the cease fire agreement. To sum it up, it doesn't look at all like the status quo has changed, with Iran only approving a select few ships to transit the strait and is collecting tolls of up to $2 million per vessel in crypto or Chinese Yuan. So while Wall street is celebrating the economic impact of the war inflation, a global supply crunch for key raw materials looks to continue for the foreseeable future. There's relief, but massive question marks about what lies ahead.

C (4:08)

And the people asking those questions are oil executives because they kind of called up the White House and go, wait a second, we didn't have to do any of this stuff before the war broke out. Now we have to pay a toll. We're going to have to pass on those costs to consumers. The big thing that they keep saying is it's precedent risk. Because now if Iran has control of the Strait of Hormuz, what does that mean for other places around the world like the Strait of Malacca, the Bosphorus Strait like other choke points that are naturally occurring. But now that Iran has kind of seized control of this one, do other countries try the same thing? But everyone just keeps going back to six weeks ago. We didn't have to do any of this. Ships were moving through the strait freely. Hundreds of ships every single day. Now we're celebrating if five make it through. It just doesn't seem like the war had the intended effect.

B (4:55)

We're also hearing from shipping companies. Maersk, which is the second biggest in the world, kind of talked about the pathway for shipping in the future. Said the cease fire may create transit opportunities, but it does not yet provide full maritime certainty and we need to understand all potential conditions attached. And you have Hapag Lloyd out of Germany, another huge container ship company, said it's going to continue to avoid Hormuz for now, but added that the cease fire was a positive development.

C (5:20)

I liked what Nippon you send said a big shipping company out of Japan said it was monitoring the situation. They're just like us. Yeah. But the big takeaway is that the economic fallout from this is just beginning. One because people are treating this like a permanent cease fire. It's not like this is still temporary. There's still enough time for the status quo to change once again. But everyone just keeps saying that you can't bring on infrastructure flipping a switch. You know, a lot of these places have been damaged. You can't just say production needs to get back up to, you know, the pre war time. So that's the general outlook is that this scenario is going to take a long time to uncomb. The global economy is not just something that you can kind of run your hands through and then like it's flowing again. It takes a while to get that snarl out.

B (6:06)

And then we're also seeing companies starting to report earnings and they'll obviously talk about the impact of the war. Delta Airlines, the biggest US airline reported yesterday and said that we are going to have to pay $2 billion more in higher fuel costs through June because of the war and the spike in oil prices. So we're probably going to hear from a lot more companies coming over the next weeks and months talking about the impact of the war and showing that the economic consequences are not going to be confined to the five weeks that the war was happening, but it's going to be lasting months in the future.

C (6:39)

Moving on for 16 years, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, who's sitting on 1.1 million of the Biggest crypto on earth has been one of the great unsolved mysteries of the modern age. But the New York Times reporter John Carreyou thinks he's cracked it after an eight month long investigation. Carry you thinks it's adam back, a 55 year old British cryptographer. The main evidence Kerryu puts forward is a series of posts between 1997 and 1999 that lay out every core feature of Bitcoin from built in scarcity to publicly verifiable protocol. To tie the writing to Back Carry you used forensic linguistics running 34,000 of the posts through writing quirk filters to narrow down a pool of 620 candidates to just one. 1. Adam Back Kara, you confronted Back at a crypto forum asking him to explain other so called coincidences like why he conveniently went silent on cryptography forums the entire time Satoshi was active or why he refused to hand over the metadata on emails that would clear his name. Back offered up no real explanations. The final smoking gun Kerryu puts forth is that Back is about to become CEO of a publicly traded bitcoin treasury company. Which means if he is Satoshi, the the billions in bitcoin controlled by Satoshi's wallet becomes a legally material disclosure he's required to tell shareholders about it all. Sounds pretty compelling except for one small wrinkle. Back himself was quick to shut it all down. He called the case confirmation bias, saying similarities in writing and timing are just that, coincidences. Neil, is Satoshi British?

B (8:13)

Possibly. Here's the thing Adam Back has this is not the first time that he's been accused or identified as satoshi so he's very good at denying it. And the person who is Satoshi probably does not want people to know because their paper wealth, because they have 1.1 million bitcoin is they're going to be worth $78 billion. So this is going to be one of the richest people in the world. It's not something, something that you want to maybe brag about and all of a sudden put a target on your back. And speaking of back, Adam Back said a couple of years ago no one knows who Satoshi is and that's a good thing. So even if he is, he's probably going to deny it.

C (8:48)

A lot of this evidence came from one this kind of roadmap that Back laid out for Bitcoin. Back in 7 back wrote on forums that he wants Bitcoin's core principles to be privacy distributed across a computer network built in scarcity to prevent inflation. No trust required in any Individual or bank. And then it's insane. But two days later he added a fifth, a publicly verifiable protocol. All of that eventually made it into bitcoin's white paper. So he had kind of the technical know how or at least the philosophical alignment with what bitcoin eventually became. So that's one thing is that like Back had the roadmap, he wrote it himself. And then there is this sort of forensic linguistics where they're tying a lot. Everyone has idiosyncrasies in the way that they write, in the way that they punctuate things. And so that's what Kerry you did. He went back and found that both back in satoshi use two spaces between sentences. Weird stuff like that. They often punctuated. It's incorrectly. Which is something I also do. Do you put the apostrophe or not? I might be satoshi. And then there's just like small little things where. Where they hyphenate some words, where they use adjectives in certain ways, where they use check the British spelling and not the American spelling. They use both the British and American spelling of optimize. So these all leave basically a fingerprint in your writing. And so that's where Kerry is. Like your fingerprint matches satoshi's writing very, very closely.

B (10:15)

Let's be clear. There is no smoking gun here. It's all circumstantial evidence. And back says this is also just a coincidence. So it's not that strong of a denial either. But John Carrey Roo has a lot of cred. He won the Pulitzer prize twice. And he is the man known for exposing Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes for the fraud it was. And that probably wouldn't have happened if he hadn't gone snooping. So in terms of doing corporate detective work, I mean, he is 1A. So, you know, maybe that lends a little bit more credence. He spent 18 months searching for satoshi. At this point, the question is, does it really matter who satoshi is? A lot of people in the bitcoin community say we don't actually want to know. We're moving on. By this point, it really doesn't matter who he is. And we don't or they are, and we don't actually want to know because it's not really material to bitcoin. Unless he starts selling that $1.1 million and the 1.1 million Bitcoin, then the entire market falls out from beneath them. But I always find mysteries interesting and, you know, we'll see whether it was an enjoyable read.

C (11:14)

Like I really do enjoy like the the forensic linguistics because I wonder if my footprint is just so easily identifiable. I feel like I'm probably like there are certain things that you just misspell. So just from a pure interest level, I recommend reading the piece Moving on America's Next Top Model Might be from Metta Meta, along the laggard of the air race, got its act together, unveiling Muse Spark yesterday, its first major release, and spending a boatload of money building out its super intelligence unit. Muse Spark isn't racing to the very top of the LM pecking order, but it's certainly in the mix. It lags in coding ability, but can keep up on most reasoning and excels at multimodal functions that combine voice, text and images. Shield Monot a VC on X posted that in his limited time tinkering with the model, he tested it using his last several Claude queries and liked Meta's answers better. Anecdotal, but clearly a step up from its last publicly launched open source model, llama4, which was a big disappointment and prompted Zuck to make a strategy change. Muse Spark, in addition to being led by AI Wonderkid and Scale AI founder Alexander Wang, is the first closed source model Metta has released. Spark will be put right into Primetime, powering AI features on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and other functions across Met his business in the coming weeks. In typical metal fashion, Spark comes with a shopping mode too that will help you buy clothes or decorate a room. Neil it looks like the market liked what it saw. Meta stock jumped 9% when the model was released, relieved that the company's $100 billion build out of AI infrastructure won't be without something to show for it.

B (12:51)

It's been quite a few days for model drops. If Anthropics Mythos was the Batmobile, this one is maybe more the Honda Civic. It's not going to wow you, but it's efficient, dependable and gets you from point A to point B. Which is a good thing for Metta, which has stumbled a lot in its AI build out or its AI models like consumer facing models. It is getting lapped right now by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. And now it has a little something to show for its massive investments in human capital and in Cap X in actual data centers for AI.

C (13:22)

I think the big emotion felt by Meta investors was just relief that all of this spending is not for nothing. Wired put out a headline about this model drop, saying Meta's new model gives Mark Zuckerberg a seat at the big kids table. Again, he's not, you know, pushing the forefront of these large language models. They're not the leading frontier model, but at least it's competitive with a lot of the good models out there. I mean, remember, if you're competitive with Opus, which is Claude's top model before Mythos was released, that's a good model. Like, people really enjoy using cloud. It's very effective. It is fascinating, though, that they didn't prioritize coding as much because that's been maybe the core use case of a lot of these other ones. They went more to the multimodal side, which I guess makes sense for matter because it is a social media company. So fascinating little split from kind of the consensus.

B (14:11)

I also think AI companies are getting a little bit better at naming models. Remember, a few years ago is like GPT 405Z and now we're getting some some better names and better naming conventions. I think they're learning things like we got Mythos, Sonnet and Opus from Anthropic. I mean, those are gorgeous to say. Gemini is pretty fun. OpenAI Even as Codex, which I like. And now we got Muse Spark from Meta. I mean, I think we're getting better.

C (14:34)

I know, but we were just talking before the show like it's either Muse or Spark. Why did you need to combine Muse and Spark? What are people going to actually call that? I ended up calling it Meta Spark, so maybe there's still a ways to go. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neil's numbers right after this.

B (14:53)

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C (14:57)

Yeah, locked doors.

B (14:58)

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C (15:09)

In fact, Noom found users lose on average 8 pounds in 30 days on their micro dose protocol.

B (15:15)

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C (15:33)

Well, I asked our producer to slap me across the face as hard as they can or drink coffee.

B (15:38)

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C (15:50)

And with flavors like cool mint, wintergreen, tropical, and watermelon, it's hard to pick a favorite.

B (15:56)

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C (16:02)

Neil, you like slashing?

B (16:04)

I don't understand the question and I won't respond to it.

C (16:07)

And you'll love Vanguard because they're slashing fees again, again, this time for more than 50 of its funds. That's on top of big fee cuts they gave last year to investors.

B (16:17)

This is for the financial advisors out there whose job is to help their clients keep more of what they earn.

C (16:22)

Go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com/impact. That's vanguard.com impact all investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor welcome to Neil's

B (16:34)

Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will make you feel like you're in a cartoon and a light bulb just popped up above your head for my first number. San Francisco is so back. And by back, I mean it's once again way too expensive to live there. The median house price in San Francisco spiked to 2.15 million in March, up 18% from a year earlier, according to Compass. Condo prices are also skyrocketing, increasing 27% from last March to 1.36 million. Compare that to the broader US housing market, where prices inch just 0.8% higher in the year through March. AI is fueling a new gold rush. And like in 1849, it's centered in San Francisco, where industry giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and dozens of other startups have set up shop. And it's putting a lot of strain on a real estate market where demand is fast outpacing supply. Home listings in SF plunged 28% compared to a year earlier, while properties are selling for 23% above the asking price. I've seen videos online of open houses for just a standard SF apartment, and it's more packed than the L train at rush hour. Toby not too long ago, San Francisco was declared dead due to rising crime, vacant storefronts and remote work that turned out to be wrong.

C (17:40)

Yeah, there is this joke online that every time Anthropic or OpenAI raises a new round, people screenshot a unassuming house that's selling for like $2.6 million and going, look at all, you know, the, the money that's about to be flooding into this market. So it really does go as the kind of AI market goes. this point. The high end of the housing market in San Francisco is doing very well. At least 22 houses sold for more than $5 million in March. 24 condos that topped $3 million sold in March as well. So that is all time highs for some of these monthly figures that we. You mentioned the crime turnaround. I think you can't overstate that either. It is a model now on how to fight crime. If you go back to a few years ago, they were averaging 86 break ins per day. Now that's down to 15 break ins today. So a lot of kind of the doom and gloom that surrounded the city has been completely turned around from crime to the house. Well, the housing market is rough depending on which side of it that you're on. But clearly the doom loop did not come to pass.

B (18:43)

And those are car break ins per day. Just want to clarify. Yeah, and just get wait for these companies to ipo. I mean there's going to be so much more money even flooding into the real estate market because OpenAI Anthropic and some other Silicon Valley companies are about to go public later this year. And there can be a lot of really rich employees. Okay, my next number might explain the ghost in your attic. Homes in America are old. Like really old. The age of the median house has increased to a record 44 years, according to the Harvard Joint center for Housing Studies. And those creaky floorboards and leaky roofs need constant repairs. Maintenance projects whose rising costs are far outpacing broader inflation. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the cost of structural repairs in real terms, that means adjusted for inflation, jumped by about 14.1% between 2022 and 2024, while plumbing climbed even more, 23.6%. Labor is getting more expensive. The individual parts are as well, not to mention property taxes, homeowners association dues and insurance. When you buy an older home, the mortgage itself is just the start of your endless money pit journey. The conventional wisdom is to set aside 1% of the home's value for upkeep each year. But as the country's housing stock ages and breaks down, that's outdated. 2% to 3% is far more realistic, according to Angie Hicks, co founder of the home Services company. Angie? Toby, I'll tell you what, it is a rough time to be a homeowner. It is a great time to be Home Depot, a general contractor or a plumber.

C (20:04)

The issue is, is that a lot of this spend is not deferable this is not just a cosmetic facelift. Like you can't just say I'm putting new wallpaper in and not do that. It's actually non deferable work. So the share of improvement spending that is Non deferable is 49% of all improvement spending. So you can't ignore this stuff. You just have to do it. Which is why I'm sitting here renting and feeling pretty good about myself right now.

B (20:28)

I was going to say this is going to add more fuel to the debate of the renting versus homeowning debate as these, as these houses get older and just need constant repairs.

C (20:37)

And part of the issue you mentioned, you know, raising insurance premiums. You can't ignore some of these aging features. Like even if you have have something as small as a cracked driveway, insurers will look at that and say, hey, we have to jack up your premiums as well. So you really are in just a very catch 22 moment where you have to spend money in order to not spend more money on insurance. But you just, it feels like an

B (20:57)

endless money pit for my final number. Men are worse at shopping. Yes, many of you are rolling your eyes thinking, of course they are. There's even a trend on Tik Tok about it called husband grocery shopping. But as Insider reports, there's new empirical evidence to back up what we all know to be true. In a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, when a man switches to remote work, the family spends about 5% more on the same suite of grocery products. Quick note about this study. The researchers didn't actually go about trying to prove that men are worse shoppers than women. It was a side effect of a broader look at how remote work impacts shopping. And the conclusion was, yes, when you work from home, your spending increases. But it was when the researchers explored how spending changes when different spouses are working remotely that they found men are less discerning shoppers. So why are we dudes like a fish out of water at a store? Stephanie Johnson of Rice University, one of the paper's authors, told Insider it can be chalked up to a few factors. One, men are less experienced shoppers, so they don't know how to get deals too. When we do shop, we spend less time doing so, so there's less time to compare prices. And finally, we're less price sensitive. We don't mind spending more than we should because we simply don't care enough. And Rory has a tee time in 10 minutes. Toby, are you the exception to the rule or are you just as bad of a shopper as the rest of us.

C (22:11)

I mean, who can put a price on fin finding a new sweet treat to bring home? Maybe I'm not as price conscious because I'm just shopping for delight. That's the thing I'm optimizing for. But yeah, I mean, I think there's two things at play here. One is weaponized incompetence. That is something that a lot of people who, who reacted to this paper were saying is that oftentimes husbands say, well, I can't do the shopping because I don't know how to. And that just leaves more of the burden on usually the. The women in the household. So that is one thing that I implore all guys not to do. Like, you can go shopping. You can do deal comparisons. Like, this is not something that is rocket science to do. And then the other thing that some consumer behavior psychologists were showing is that historically, women have shopped for themselves on top of their kids, their partners, and their parents. Men, on the other hand, typically only have one person in mind when they're shopping, which is themselves. So maybe you are not as discerning when it comes to which laundry detergent to buy because you don't really care that much. So then why would you care about the familial household in general? So, fascinating study. Lots of layers to this. But I shot for delight, baby. Like, let's just find something fun to bring home.

B (23:22)

Let's sprint to the finish with a final headline. Hello, friends. It's once again time for the Masters, which tees off this morning at Georgia's Augusta National Golf Club. Golf's first major of the year is known for its stunning course design, its blooming azaleas, and its traditions like the winner donning a green jacket. But as business folks will tell you, the Masters is also a masterclass in brand building. Every spring, Americans marvel at the sleek mobile app, the cheap as dirt concessions, the tight restrictions on what broadcasters can say. Remember, it's patrons, not fans. And its legendary merchandise tent, which clears some $70 million in sales over the course of the week. That's 1 million an hour and 16,000 per minute. Toby, I'm so excited.

C (24:01)

I'm so excited, too. I have like 14 masters fantasy lineups. I can't even keep track of who I want to win anymore. But yeah, this merch 10 is just the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to diving into numbers, because it is insane how much money people spend there. This is not just going in and buying a single hat. Business Insider talk to people who are sometimes buying hundreds of items for their friends, their family, spending multiple thousands of dollars in a single ship. I do want to highlight some of the people Business Insider talk to. One lady bought gifts for her, her bridesmaids. She's not engaged yet. She bought 105 items, spent $3,500 on her future bridesmaids, even though she doesn't have a guy locked down yet. And then the biggest haul that Business Insider reported was one woman who bought 91 items, spent $4,458. And I can see how that's possible because the big hot item this year, in addition to the gnomes, which always sell well, mahjong set you were showing me, you know, these video Masters.

B (25:02)

Mahjong set.

C (25:03)

Beautiful. And if you buy the mahjong set all in with the mat and everything, it costs you $726. Seems worth it.

B (25:10)

So putting on my LinkedIn thought leader hat Masters is. I know, I'm sorry, but the Masters are so good at scarcity. The reason they're paying $4,000 in the merchant to bring back to their future bridesmaids is because you can't get this merch anywhere else. You have to go there. So this just creates an all around it and it drives price higher. So that's the whole thing about the Masters. And yet the thing that doesn't cost a lot, famously at the Masters, is the concession prices. And egg salad sandwich is still A$50. A pimento cheese sandwich still A$50. In fact, if you buy everything there one time, all of the concessions, it'll just set you back $75.75.

C (25:48)

You've tried them, right? They're really good. Oh, I'm so that's not one day. One day.

B (25:53)

That's not fair. So who's going to win?

C (25:56)

I think it's going to be Jon Rahm. I, by the way, called Michigan winning the national championship for men. So I'm on a heater right now. Jon Rahm will be your Masters winner.

B (26:05)

Okay, that is all the time we have. Thanks for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Thursday.

C (26:09)

I do have one more shout out. Neal, not to break your flow, but it is now my dad's birthday falling on the heels of your mom's birthday. So shout out to the parents of the MBD crew. Happy Birthday.

B (26:20)

If you'd like to reach us, send an email to Morning Brew Daily at Morning Broadcom or DM us on Instagram @me Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milian is our supervising producer. Raymond Lu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham, and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Eugenia Ogu is our technical director. Hair and makeup is more mysterious than Satoshi. Devin Emery is our president, and our show is a production of Morning Brew.

C (26:42)

Great show, Danielle. Let's run it back tomorrow.

D (26:53)

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