B (2:36)

Yeah. But as we mentioned last week too, let's not get immersed and succumb to the 24 hour news cycle and the changing of headlines and the ping ponging of Ceasefire. No ceasefire. Deal. No deal. So let's look at what's actually happening on the ground. And one thing you highlighted this week is that it seems that the balance of power in oil markets is definitely shifting towards the US And I saw this map floating around over the weekend and we see a bunch of ships going around the Horn of Africa.

A (3:05)

Yeah. So this is a map from, I call it on the bottom, Rory Johnston, she's a great kind of oil data analyst that everyone should follow on Twitter. The President is now apparently following him as he retweeted or quote tweeted or something on untruth social this map. And as evidence, you know, the, the US is, is winning bigly. But I do think it's an interesting data point showing a bunch of large tankers headed to the US to the, the, I was going to say the Gulf of Mexico, but it's now, I guess the Gulf of America kind of on, on the way in this caravan to. These are empty tankers largely. You can see that because they're, there's no outline in most of them or it's an outline with nothing filled in and you know, showing them coming to empty tankers coming to the US to, to refuel. And I think it's a combination. I think this includes everything from LNG tankers to other TYP crude tankers. But in any case, if you scroll to the next slide, you'll see this is anomalous. Right. Like this is not at least relative to prior few months that you are seeing in the data. That's not just like a snapshot of something that's always happening. There does appear to be a large reaction of VLCCs, which are very large crude carriers to the Gulf here in the US and that's in response to one of the main oil arteries and LNG arteries in the world as we've discussed for the last month, getting closed off. So yeah, I think this is, it's an interesting kind of illustration of something that we've been talking about a lot over the past few weeks, which is just this all is a game of relative leverage. And it very much remains to be seen how durably the US can benefit from this situation that we're highlighting right here. This is going to have, to the extent that this continues, it's not going to be free. Domestically, we are a net exporter of most refined petroleum products. I believe we're about neutral. Maybe it's slight importer on crude. But, you know, we have, we do have levers we can pull and ways that we can benefit from the situation that other net energy importers, especially Europe and to some extent China, you know, don't have. So this is. If you were, if you were Trump, you were the Trump team looking for ways to respond to, you know, being, being down pretty bad in the fourth quarter. Right. On industrial capacity, where over the last 25 years, China has kind of eaten your lunch on all these critical industries and they have kind of a chokehold, rare earth minerals. This is kind of a button you have to push. Right. Or you have to hope that you can push this button in some way. Whether all of this was kind of intentional from day one and we should trust the plan or whether Trump is kind of just fumbling and stumbling into this situation and this is just a natural course of events. I'll let listeners decide on that. But yeah, I think this highlights what we've been talking about, that the US Isn't totally out of cards to play. And this is kind of the main card that you would think we'd have to play. And so, yeah, this will be a key, I think, driver in deciding basically kind of who, who blinks first here in the broad, you know, east west chessboard that has been set up.

B (6:01)

Yeah. And it looks like China is reacting to this leverage, or some form of leverage shifting towards the US and they're beginning to press the, pull the levers that they have access to, particularly in the realm of sulfuric acid exports, which now are sulfuric acid exports now. But China is apparently curbing exports. The sulfuric acid. This is the LNG chart. So obviously Europe's very dependent on our lng, but China, seeing what's happening here, saying, okay, we're going to ban sulfuric acid exports as the Iran war hits supply. And as you can see on the right side of this chart, sulfuric acid is a critical input for a lot of critical sort of inputs for metal processing, phosphate fertilizers, phosphates, fibers. And so you could see a strain on those critical materials that could lead to more inflation, particularly in food prices.

A (6:56)

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's even more than just kind of the inflation impact. You know, as you note, the figure I show here is 50% of sulfuric acid exports are used for phosphate fertilizers. And you know, it's important because the Ferts market and the downstream kind of agricultural markets that globally that it depends on, that depend on it, are already very disruptive from everything that's gone on thus far out of, out of the Gulf. Lot of byproducts that come out of that region that flow into the first market. And so that's already seeing disruption even before this China announcement. So that these export curbs are outright and start in May. China is currently the largest net global exporter of these things. And so that's just going to make that market even worse potentially if this continues and ramps up. So then it becomes maybe a question of the oil impact is maybe a little more near term and obvious. And the Fert's market impact probably takes a little longer to play out just because of planting cycles and the way that crop yields work and the way that agriculture markets work. So maybe you don't see the impact of this immediately, but there will be early pull forward impacts and you will see to your point, inflation in a lot of different food prices and also probably curbing of supply in more marginal regions that outside the us, outside Western Europe, that are a little more on the cusp and on a knife's edge with food supply. So this is again, if you flip it to China's perspective, this is exactly what you'd expect to hit back, right? You play the cards that you have and I think it just comes back to the same question we've been pointing people to over the last month of it's all a game of relative leverage and who's going to blink first when you play these different types of very sensitive cards that are going to affect pretty much every market around the world.

B (8:42)

Yeah, we'll get some feedback. It's probably the most uncertain time just thinking like Covid was very uncertain, but now I think the scale of this, because Covid was, we're comparing the supply chain disruptions to Covid. Covid was obviously a black swan and the world basically shut down to try to prevent the, the virus from spreading. But now the existential threat is World War 3 and you have all these levers being pulled that really sitting back as an observer, it's like why, why are we doing this? Why, why are we thrusting the world into this type of disruption right now? And it is incredibly uncertain and I think what has been interesting to watch throughout all of this, the pull in bitcoin is Bitcoin's relative strength in this environment. And pumped to 73,000 over the weekend, I believe on Saturday. Came off of those highs yesterday, but currently floating, I believe around $71,800. So Bitcoin throughout all this has, has been reacting in a way which is actually, for lack of a better term, a pleasant surprise because it's not selling off the way it has in cycles past when a potential liquidity crisis arises in markets. It's actually acting as a risk off asset right now.

A (9:59)

Yeah, look, it's extremely interesting and I think this is still primarily, despite our, to your point, becoming sulfuric acid and BLCC experts, this is still primarily a bitcoin oriented show, a show with a bitcoin Len. But I think all of the stuff, all of these headlines we've pointed out today and in prior weeks around the situation flow into and our inputs into that ultimate view about bitcoin.

B (10:22)

Right?

A (10:23)

And to that point, as we see a progressively more fractured, perhaps multipolar, perhaps just kind of disconnected global order where just in time, inventory and supply chains just are a thing of the past and nations no longer implicitly trust one another and the US treasury market ceases to be kind of the default store of value for sovereign reserves. And in general, counterparties grow to trust one another less and less, especially between these different kind of emerging trade blocs. Right? That is the environment where something like a neutral sovereign store of value without a counterparty that can be moved in arbitrarily large size essentially instantly around the world, whose supply cannot be arbitrarily diluted by any counterparty, corporate or government or otherwise. This is the environment where you would eventually expect something like Bitcoin to thrive. It's still a baby, like an infant, a zygote relative to gold, which is the other kind of main theoretical beneficiary of an environment like that. And so I expect to see gold certainly continue to be the default way that sovereigns and corporations, big international corporations, express an awareness of that view as it becomes more and more consensus. But I think we've talked about it on the show before. I think that only further and further paves the pathway for Bitcoin to gain a progressively larger percentage share of global wealth and global sovereign store value balances over time as that thesis gets more and more obvious and more clear. And yeah, I mean, I think we might have said it in prior episodes as well, but this is the kind of price action that you look for for bottom formation in any asset. Not calling a bottom. Because if we wake up tomorrow and Trump decides we're actually just going to unload the nukes on Tehran, who knows what's going to happen and certainly pray that that does not happen. There are a lot, but you know, there are a lot of fat left tails here now that have to be considered. So who knows what's going to happen week to week, month to month. But in general, when you see something price on something, get absolutely nuked, everyone's puking, running away from it, it gets out of favor and then like really bad headlines start to hit, that should be really scary. And you know, the thing kind of does nothing or even goes up a little bit. Like that's what you want to see for bottom formation. So I definitely think if you're looking just at the bitcoin lens, this has been, I think, a very constructive environment for bitcoin's fundamentals. And I don't think that's lost on big banks, big corporations and importantly sovereigns who are kind of dealing with this.

B (12:49)

Yeah, and we'll bring it back to bitcoin, particularly in this environment, because there's some speculation about how it's being used in the Strait of Hormuz by the irgc. But before we get to that, I think another shifting back to the east west dynamic, the levers are being pulled and I think it's very clear that at least between the United States and China, this race to win the AI war is considered existential by both, by both governments, if you will. And I think one of the sort of sub themes of the last week is Anthropic's model Mythos, which they have not released. They're actually, they've released it, I guess to, to enterprise clients, Google and others in an attempt to try to make sure that systems are prepared for when it does get unleashed on the public. Because they're positioning it as something that is more powerful than any LLM that's ever existed. There was a report out there that was able to find zero day bugs in many of the critical software libraries and operating systems that exist out there and that people depend on. And so anthropic sound of the alarm bell last week, like we think this model is a step function improvement on Opus 4.6 and it's too dangerous to unleash. And that has caught the attention of the government. And there were many sort of meetings on the Hill last week about this, one of which was Scott Besant Summoning Wall street leaders for an urgent meeting, concerns concerning Mythos and how they should be preparing for it. And so you can begin to see a narrative, an AI narrative bubbling into the scene as well. And it looks like we're getting to a point where the governments are saying, no, these tools are very powerful, and we'll get into what could be happening here. So what are your thoughts on this?

A (14:36)

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I totally think that the basic narrative that you outlined is all legitimate and potentially, I think that's how it's been generally received in the media. And it's not in any way beyond the realm of reality that everything that anthropic is saying or leaking out, whatever, through trusted media sources is correct about Mythos. I don't doubt that we see it every day. AI is making crazy gains, and eventually, if not already, that will have meaningful cybersecurity implications. And certainly that flows into kind of if you're trying to pull certain strategic levers against a geopolitical adversary. Right now, pending further distillation, we'll see if that can continue. But right now, the US does have a lead in the frontier models. And so we saw it a month ago or two months ago with the rift between Anthropic and the tartan of war on how the models could be used. But this is becoming more and more of a legitimate national security conversation and a key kind of weapon in what Washington, I think, sees as this decoupling, a soft or hard decoupling is kind of up to you to think about, but I think that's all legitimate. I found the story really interesting, though, this week, because it's like when I just came across the wire, it just kind of didn't fully pass the sniff test for me. And maybe it's just after years of being manipulated by every form of being the most propagandized generation in history. So maybe I'm just. My tinfoil hat's gotten too much use. But for the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chairman, so Powell and Besant to have a joint meeting that was allegedly apparently an urgent emergency meeting with basically the heads of all the USG sibs. So the globally systemic, important banks. Jamie Dimon, interestingly, was not there. I don't know if that means anything. But in any case, Citi, you see here, Citi, Morgan Stanley, bank of America, Wells Fargo, all kind of summoned the heads of those banks, and Goldman summoned to D.C. to have this joint meeting. And you see that it's about cybersecurity. And it's like, okay, Maybe. Right. It's definitely possible that there's some zero day in the core elements of banking tech infrastructure that they need to be aware of and need to quickly find patches for. And it's going to have this major, it's this major systemic risk to the US and their customers and US Financial infrastructure. That's definitely possible. But our buddy Matt Dines at Build had an interesting tweet that I feel like really resonated with me over the weekend. It was aligned with kind of my thinking that if you were going to perhaps leverage Mythos where you have this kind of geopolitical lead right now against your adversaries on something like financial infrastructure, might you want to read in the heads of the biggest banks in your country? And I believe also the bank of Canada was later kind of briefed on this and brought into the circle. Might you want to brief these guys on something that you were about to do or that you wanted them to do? Right. And then would you not kind of allow the narrative to percolate that it was just about kind of informing them about cybersecurity risks? As with a lot of things we talk about on the show, maybe that's only a 10% or 20% probability, but I think the market was reading it as a zero last week. It was pretty hook, line and sinker type narrative that exactly what was presented was correct about what was happening. And I think it's worth thinking about again as we consider where we're going in this world that we're heading into. The assets that you want to be out allocated to in a case where something like that were to happen. And I think even more generally putting the tinfoil hat on even more. If I were looking at as the Fed and Treasury, if I were looking at the systemic breaks that might be coming down the pipe from everything that we're seeing just generally in energy markets and how that flows through to all these other markets, to food, to metals and mining, to AI, to government tax receipts ultimately and government finances. If I saw that coming down the pipe, I might want to urgently gather all the heads of the G sibs and read them in on, hey, here's what's going to happen here's over the next month, what we see coming here are the new facilities we might want to put in place. We need to have you guys ready to do XYZ thing and inevitably that meeting is going to get leaked if all those guys are there in that same room at one time. So I might also just want to float the cybersecurity mythos narrative as a complete red herring and redirect from what people would otherwise be speculating about this kind of meeting. Right? So this is definitely tinfoil hat territory. It's definitely speculative territory, but we've seen much crazier things. And it's, I think, definitely not outside the realm of possibility that we're about to hit some sort of systemically hairy event in Western financial infrastructure or just global financial infrastructure in the next month. And if so, this is exactly the type of meeting that you would expect to see.

B (19:25)

Right? Well, I mean, I'm picking up what you're putting down. I'm picking up what Matt's putting down. The whole mythos narrative. It was very, very obvious. I mean, I think the first day where they released the research on the zero days and wrote the blog post and said, hey, we have this model, we're not releasing it. We actually, what do they call it, Operation Glasswing, which is giving it to all the enterprise clients so they can prepare their systems. Like that narrative hit. It was scary. But then two days later, somebody released another report like, well, actually they could have used Opus 4.6 to get like 80% of the way there. And it's actually not that big of an improvement on Opus 4.6. And then I was seeing, I don't know if you saw this commentary from some hardcore white hat hackers. They're like, hey, we all know these zero days exist. People can find them if they want to, but it's legal to actually, like execute a zero day bug on these critical systems. Like, you would go to jail. You'd be found out. So, like, people have known that these zero days exist. They just don't take advantage of them because it's very illegal and we're talking federal prison. So it's not as groundbreaking as Anthropic was making a mythos to be. And then another meeting that was on. I don't know if it was a meeting or just a warning, but I think the treasury warned about private equity and private credit or exposure to insurance companies, or vice versa, insurance players sort of exposure to private credit and private equity which has been bubbling behind the scenes. I had Nick Namath, who's a young analyst who's diving into this, doing research in parallel with Tom Grover Gober, excuse me, who's on Steve Eisman's podcast about a month ago, ringing the alarm bell about insurance's exposure to private credit and the mismatch in liabilities that may emerge there and a potential trillion dollar hole. And so to your point, maybe there is a liquidity crisis as private credit, I guess bubble popping. There were more redemption gates last week. I forget which fund. Was it Apollo?

A (21:22)

Yeah, it was Carlisle.

B (21:23)

Carlisle. Yeah. And so you have this private credit complex that seems to be slowly blowing up. And to your point, like it would not be shocking at all to learn that Mythos was a red herring used to get all the banks in the room to say, hey, this private credit thing's actually pretty systemic. Like you guys need to prepare.

A (21:40)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I forgot to put that in the slides, but yeah, we had it in the newsletter this past week. But in addition to everything else going on in global supply chains and all the implications that can and will have, we've got a trillion dollar kind of what appears increasingly to be like a slow moving train wreck in private credit, especially as it relates to the insurance industry's exposure to it. And there was an AM Best report that was released over the weekend about how basically diagnosing that the annuity selling insurance funds are significantly worse off, in their words, in of financial positioning than they were on the eve of the financial crisis because of this private credit exposure. So yeah, look, I don't know if it was that. I don't know if it was something we're completely missing or misdiagnosing. But yeah, in general, I think worth asking yourself, does the Mythos narrative for that meeting really kind of hold water? And if not, what might it suggest that that was happening last week?

B (22:31)

Yeah, such uncertainty, uncertainty risk, bad credit exposure. Crazy times, crazy times. But moving on, moving this back to bitcoin, like we were saying, relative strength. And there is a narrative forming in the straight of Hermuz about tolls being paid and who's controlling the straits. Obviously Trump over the weekend said, we're going to put tonight we're putting a blockade. But before that, last week one of the big narratives was that when the ceasefire was on and you had the list of concessions that each side was making for a period of time of a few days last week, one of the concessions was, okay, the IRGC will have control of the straits and will be able to charge a toll for ships making their way through the streets. And one of the narratives that formed was the Financial Times reporting that the IRDC is only accepting bitcoin for payment in the Strait of Hermes. And many bitcoiners pick this up. We talked about it in one of the bitcoin briefs last week at tftc. Matt and I covered it extensively on Rabbit Hole recap last week. But I think whether or not it was true, I think this is a good way to sort of just talk about this. Because who knows, like we're saying the headlines are switching every 12 hours at this point and who knows what's actually happening? But let's just talk about the theoretical. The idea of Iran having control and then only accepting Bitcoin as payment and why that makes sense.

A (23:54)

Yeah, for sure. And yeah, all the caveats like that you guys have talked about, you know, apply, like maybe he misspoke. Maybe he meant stablecoins. Maybe he, this guy was just completely making it up. Maybe he's not authorized speak for it. Totally can buy the idea that this would be a really hacky kind of way. Like the way they're describing how they would do it, would that ever sustain, would they have any ability to actually enforce anything like this? All those questions are legitimate. Alex Thorne at Galaxy did a really good article last week that I recommend people read about this and answering kind of questions about its validity. So put that aside. But I think it was a very interesting and meaningful little kind of item in Bitcoin's history and growth. It's mainstreaming that this would be reported, taken soon, seriously and legitimately considered by a lot of people. Last week, well outside the bitcoin echo chamber, I think speaks to a growing diffusion of awareness of understanding of Bitcoin's properties. And I think you guys at TFTC did a really good graphic that I put on the next slide about what bitcoin can do as money. And you of course got all the reply guys who wanted to score their Twitter likes when this headline hit about how bitcoin's so slow or it's bad for payments or how terrible it would be for Iran to actually try to use it. And I like this taxonomy that you guys put out of the different ways that Bitcoin, either natively or with layer two solutions, or layer three or kind of the application layer, however you want to think about it. For these different use cases, Bitcoin can kind of slot into a bunch of different areas on the spectrum between the need for very fast, quick, cheap micropayments to something more like your coffee payments, to something more on an enterprise level, to finally providing money for enemies. Right? The classic meme that is becoming less and less of a meme and more and more I think obviously acknowledged for what it is, which is Bitcoin as this neutral asset that is ideally suited for highly sensitive, large settlements between untrusted counterparties, which is to our Point from the start of the show today. Exactly what we're looking at more and more regardless of what happens with Hormuz. That seems to be the world that we're heading in. And I think this, this week with that headline was a great little kind of test case or dry run for people to think through the properties that would make a story like that plausible in the first place.

B (26:20)

Yeah. And just to really dig into it, this is something that I've been saying for probably like five or six years now back when I was working at Great America Mining. It's funny, I've got my Great American Mining coffee mug today. But for those who are unaware, I helped co founded a off grid bitcoin mining mining company where we mitigated flare gas using bitcoin mining in the Bakken company started in 2018. Early to the game but back then when it was close to that part of the mining industry it became very obvious to me. Obviously you have the function of mining using wasted trend and energy to monetize those assets. But then you think about Bitcoin as the monetary good and always made sense to me. We'll know that bitcoin has made it and it is a any sort of well recognized reserve asset global settlement network. When international oil trades are being done in bitcoin and to your point like thinking about the scale of that type of transaction, you're not going to want to do that through the lightning network or probably using an ecash mint. You're going to want the assurances of protocol level bitcoin on chain bitcoin and the properties that exist at that level. And I think the main properties are number one, one final settlement that is basically buried in energy in the form of blocks being produced on top of the block. That includes your transaction. And then sort of the smart contract capabilities of bitcoin, particularly multisig, where you can envision a future where you have international oil trade, you have a buyer who says okay, I want to buy oil from you. And the seller says okay, I will bring you the oil, but I need some sort of assurance that you're actually going to deliver the money at the end of the day. So the buyer puts bitcoin up in a multi sig big escrow or maybe they hold a key. The seller of the oil holds a key and the impartial third party holds a key. The oil gets delivered and the receiver says okay, I got the oil, you can disperse the funds to the seller. The Strait of Hormuz toll is not that exactly, but it is a step in that direction. It's not settling the oil trade, it's enabling it to happen in the first place in this wartime, in this war footing that we're seeing right now. And I think to your point, it is a validation of something that bitcoiners myself, yourself have been talking about for many years now. And throughout all the noise, I think that's one signal. The fact that it's even being considered or talked about. Who knows if it's actually being considered. But the fact that it's being talked about and recognized as a mechanism to facilitate this particular toll use case between enemies is a validation of why bitcoin exists. And, and on that note, I know we're running long here. This will probably be a longer episode. I think juxtaposing why bitcoin is perfectly suited for this and something like stablecoins is not dovetailing into the piece that you published over the weekend.

A (29:09)

Yeah, for sure. You heard a lot about when this headline hit, there was this debate, like I was referring to, between whether it was, did he mean stablecoins? Did he actually mean to include bitcoin? And I think that whether he did or he didn't, I think it brings up an interesting differentiation, an important differentiation, which is if Iran truly wanted to take some form of digital currency for this hypothetical tollbooth that I think we all agree probably isn't going to exist at scale, if any country wanted to do that in an untrusted environment, particularly if they were an adversary of the US they really wouldn't want to do it with stablecoins, which are basically wrappers for the US banking system. And I wrote a piece digging into that at great length. You can find it at 1031 timestamp.com stablecoins most of it is definitively not about Iran or the situation, but just kind of going over a taxonomy of where we sit with stablecoins and some of the consensus narratives that have emerged around them. I think the piece and we at 1031 are directionally aligned with the idea that there will be a future for, and probably a thriving future for some form of a digital dollar. But I think there's been a belief that that's going to mean significant benefits for public blockchain on which these stablecoins currently ride. And I think the essence of the piece you can kind of see roughly distilled in this very complicated table that we don't have to get into. But basically the thesis is blockchains are not really purpose built for facilitating high volume Especially sensitive dollar denominated commerce or fiat denominated commerce. The things that people want out of stablecoin payments are better suited for just being run on a database, centralized, very fast, highly optimized database base, which because blockchains don't scale natively, you're going to end up with some form of significant intermediation and trusted third parties, kind of regardless of what you do. That's where the incentives skew. That's where the technical details can ultimately skew and push you. And so in that case, if you're just going to use a database for sensitive dollar denominated commerce, the future I think is going to look very different for what we think of as stablecoins today. And whatever benefit they might see is not going to flow through to public blockchains. And so there's a lot that we're not going to get into today, but recommend people go check that out as they think through. Especially like what does the future of international exchange look like? Is the oil trade going to run on USD denominated stablecoins on Ethereum? As you think through questions like that, with everything we're seeing today, hopefully that piece is helpful in maybe answering why some of those instincts are misplaced.

B (31:41)

Everybody go read it. And and on that note too, I don't know if you saw, but I think a headline hit the tape this morning that the Trump administration is floating a 1% remittance tax as well. And so that's just another example of like, okay, if they do that remittance tax and people are choosing to do that via stablecoins or the traditional banking system, the likelihood of them having to pay that tax is far higher than if they were to use something like Bitcoin, which can be sent and received relatively pseudo anonymously. So if you want to route around that, that Bitcoin is better suited than stablecoins or the traditional banking system, which

A (32:13)

to be clear, we're not promoting or endorsing anyone trying to get around US laws and regulations, just identifying the likely,

B (32:20)

describing the landscape that exists.

A (32:22)

Agreed.

B (32:23)

John. This was great. Almost 40 minutes, our longest one yet. But I think it was important to go as deep as we did today, considering everything going on and really ending on your piece, which again, everybody should go read, read. I think I said this over a year ago, was my pinned tweet for the better part of the last year, which is, I think the noise of this cycle. Within Bitcoin and broader crypto stable coins, real world assets, the signal is going to be Bitcoin its integration to the energy sector and its emergence in international commerce. I said that I believe in July of 25, and it seems to be playing out. June of 25, I think. So here we are. Until next week. See you guys.