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“I think from the industry point of view, they saw there there are major dislocations, and those dislocations are playing out unevenly across the world. Asia hit the hardest, Europe feeling it, and then The US mainly seen it in terms of rising prices at the gasoline pump, but no problem getting supplies. But in Asia, a big problem getting supplies.”

“Like many people, I read the letter that he wrote, and it is apologizing for what he's done. It's sort of a goodbye letter to people that he loves. It is imagining, at times, a q and a where he imagines criticism, and then he imagines what he would say in response to that criticism about his actions.”

“The post was deleted after many, including Trump supporters, criticized the imagery. Trump also said he won't apologize to to pope Leo after lashing out at the pontiff for his comments criticizing the war in Iran. Pope Leo called the president's threats last week to destroy Iranian civilization unacceptable.”

“In this episode, we examine the astonishing $300 billion venture funding in Q1 2026.”

“So as part of this larger debate about how to keep the president safe, how to keep senior officials safe, the president and his senior advisers are all arguing that this incident only shows how badly they need to finish construction of the White House Ballroom. This is a larger fight that, you know, has been going on for months about whether this is really necessary or proper and whether the president can do it on his own without congressional approval. A judge has said no, but that legal fight is still going on.”

“Almost 80% of Iran's 90 million population use the internet for commercial or social purposes. But now they find themselves digitally cut off from the rest of the world after the government imposed a blackout soon after the start of the hostilities. The Global Internet Monitor, NetBlock, says the shutdown has exceeded all other comparable incidents in severity.”

“Well, it was that in fact a nightmare scenario that had been in not only for energy, but for strategic planners for decades had happened. I think it's one of those things that people looked at as a scenario but thought it would never happen, but then it happened. And it does change the world and it changes the way people think about energy. We've had supply chain shocks, but this was the mother of all supply chain shocks in terms of the closure of the Strait Of Hormuz.”

“At the Vatican, thousands of Christian faithful are filling St. Peter's Square on this Easter Sunday. Pope Leo delivered the traditional Easter blessing in Latin, asking that God's grace and peace remain with the faithful. The American Pope also addressed the crowd in English, saying 'Happy Easter! May you bring the joy of Jesus, who is risen and present in our midst, to all you meet.'”

“the direction is going to go down, and it's going to go down because you having the interruptions to oil exports, because that source of capital is that you export oil and gas. You get the income, you spend some of it domestically, and then the surplus you invest a broad”

“We have to ask ourselves if we should start thinking more carefully about constraints. I think one thing that we conflate a lot in crypto is decentralization and permissionlessness, because they're not the same thing. Even just talking about permissionlessness, people usually assume you mean KYC, but a protocol can restrict what kinds of assets or collateral it will allow, or it can impose rate limits. If we even want to survive as an industry and a technology, we need to really seriously think about the trade-offs between crypto's core values and keeping users safe.”

“So as part of this larger debate about how to keep the president safe, how to keep senior officials safe, the president and his senior advisers are all arguing that this incident only shows how badly they need to finish construction of the White House Ballroom. This is a larger fight that, you know, has been going on for months about whether this is really necessary or proper and whether the president can do it on his own without congressional approval. A judge has said no, but that legal fight is still going on.”

“We had two different prices going at the same time. We had the the Brent, the futures price, which was always saying, well, this is gonna end and prices are gonna come down. And then there was the dated Brent, the near term, which said, we are having a major dislocation and prices are really going up. And we've never seen that dislocation on that scale before. It was like two different visions of the world almost.”

“Nothing we can really do about that apart from, you know, clean up our act as it relates to some of these things we've just kind of brushed under the rug, like, having one of one multisigs for, you know, securing nine figures. I think, like, 97% of layer zero DBN setups were one of one or two of two. So, like, that's a problem. That should be addressed. Yeah. Can I can I just add one small thing? You know, back in the day at Chorus one, we looked at a lot of these interop networks, and we used to optimize as both investors and users sort of the most secure bridge.”

“WAP is, like, emerging competitor to Stripe. 2,000,000 businesses and, like, 20,000,000 creators hold assets on WAP. They had a partnership with Aave and Plasma and Tether, right, to just if you're holding money on their platform, hey, you wanna earn some yield? They're gonna deposit that into AVE on plasma in the background. And so so it's defi mullet cases, which I think could have gotten big, big chunks of depositors just because, you know, it's all abstracted away. Now that's gonna be kinda hard. Right? Because those risks and, you know, if I was just talking about an ETH depositor that didn't know about kelp kelp DAO.”

“We have to ask ourselves if we should start thinking more carefully about constraints. I think one thing that we conflate a lot in crypto is decentralization and permissionlessness, because they're not the same thing. Even just talking about permissionlessness, people usually assume you mean KYC, but a protocol can restrict what kinds of assets or collateral it will allow, or it can impose rate limits. If we even want to survive as an industry and a technology, we need to really seriously think about the trade-offs between crypto's core values and keeping users safe.”

“Amex answered the three hardest questions in agentic commerce: identity, mandate, and accountability. When the agent screws up, who pays? This is the one that matters most, and crypto has obviously not figured it out. Amex says we will pay if you use our rails and the agent screws up. That is what is going to unlock adoption for agentic commerce—the liability and the accountability—especially because the laws in this space are so uncertain and current laws are built for humans swiping cards rather than AI agents.”

“this is not the first time that the US security umbrella disappoints the Gulf. This is one episode out of several. There's this current one which is probably the biggest. There's an episode in twenty seventeen one cutter Face to blockade from its neighbors and didn't get the US protection that it wanted.”

“80% [of the funding was] allocated to AI startups.”

“The defendant is alleged to having traveled across state lines with the intent to both target an individual and a major technology company. This was not spontaneous. This was planned, targeted, and extremely serious.”

“We also talk about the AI industry's seemingly insatiable demand for electricity, and how this is rippling across the entire energy landscape. This is part of the long term trajectory of the energy layout which seems to have been altered, no matter what happens immediately with the conflict in Iran.”

“I think accountability is really important and we can't have that unless we're allowed to ask questions. And so we shouldn't be silencing each other every time something like this happens. What about the victims, right? They deserve to know what happened and why and what these teams are going to do about it, what the industry is going to do about it to make sure that it doesn't happen again. We can't just give thoughts and prayers; we need to improve things and ensure accountability for those who lose funds.”

“So on Monday, there were a few key developments. First, the suspect, Cole Allen, was formally charged in a criminal complaint. He was charged with attempting to assassinate the president. That wasn't the only charge, but it's the most important charge by far because that charge carries a potential life sentence. The other two charges in the criminal complaint are transportation of a firearm over interstate commerce, and that's a reference to him allegedly bringing the weapons across country, and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence.”

“We also discuss... Meta's recent AI security incident.”

“UConn center, Terrace Reed Jr. capped the Huskies' scoring in the 71-62 victory with key free throws in the game's final seconds. This season, Reed has shot a below average 59% from the line, but was determined to change that. Reed said he looked at his coach with 30 seconds left and asked to catch the ball and be fouled because he trusted the work he put in to knock the shots down.”

“We had two different prices going at the same time. We had the the Brent, the futures price, which was always saying, well, this is gonna end and prices are gonna come down. And then there was the dated Brent, the near term, which said, we are having a major dislocation and prices are really going up. And we've never seen that dislocation on that scale before. It was like two different visions of the world almost.”

“We also discuss the implications of new AI regulations... [including] Georgia's AI bills.”

“It found forty one percent of traded mammals shared at least one pathogen with humans, while just 6% of non traded ones did. And the longer humans have been trading animals, the more viruses they share. For every decade in the wildlife trade, an additional new pathogen jumps to humans.”

“First, the suspect, Cole Allen, was formally charged in a criminal complaint. He was charged with attempting to assassinate the president. That wasn't the only charge, but it's the most important charge by far because that charge carries a potential life sentence. The other two charges in the criminal complaint are transportation of a firearm over interstate commerce, and that's a reference to him allegedly bringing weapons across country, and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence.”

“It's not even about smart contract exploits anymore; you can have a million audits and that wasn't the cause of any of these recent attacks. Now it's about all the dependencies around oracles and bridges and collateral and multi-sig configurations or operational security practices. It sort of feels like you're just playing whack-a-mole. North Korea and other illicit actors are just going to keep coming up with new ways, probably greatly aided by AI, to exploit vulnerabilities in the systems surrounding the core code.”

“I would just say that if you look at the composition of deposits and lending activity on these borrow lend protocols, people are interested in RWAs much more so than crypto native assets. I think it's pretty clear that the driver of the let the next cycle or at least a big part of the story is gonna be different types of actual real world assets and people using it, like, RWA looping, this broader, trend. Shout out three f, small but proud bag holder there. But, yeah, I think that that's gonna be a big part of the story.”

“The head of Iran's forensic medical agency says the country's death toll in the war over the past six weeks has surpassed three thousand. Additionally, 857 schools, 32 universities, and 338 hospitals were damaged or destroyed by air strikes, according to the Iranian Red Crescent.”

“Japan's opposition party is calling for increased nuclear plant usage to offset the Iran crisis, and that's highlighting how energy security is becoming a critical investment theme.”

“If you have a large portion of the ecosystem, in this case, all of Layer 0's users, if you have something like 47% of them going with this one-of-one verifier setup, it starts to look less like an individualized choice, and more like actually standard architecture, or even the industry norm. I think what courts will eventually have to wrestle with is, when is it not enough to say, oh, we just provided the options, or we provided the tools? Defaults matter, and the options you give actually shape user behavior.”

“I think here, though, there is a big difference between, for example, the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 and what happened here. Because I think there was a clear security failure in Butler where you had a rooftop with a sight line toward the candidate that was not protected, that was not guarded. Here, the situation, I think, is quite different in that this person tried to essentially bum rush a fancy black tie gala. He made it a matter of steps past the initial security screening, but he never even got onto the floor where the event was happening.”

“SoftBank's $40 billion OpenAI investment. So they're putting together this big round for OpenAI. I think this is obviously a massive number, but that's almost secondary to what it represents when industry is really headed in an interesting direction. I think for me, what it's showing is there is a barrier to entry for building these kind of top-line AI models, and this barrier to entry is very high.”

“The new detail is that the compute that they're basically turning off for SORA. So it was kind of very computationally intensive to run that video model. So they're shutting that down, and they're actually going to be giving that directly to robotics research. I think they looked at AI video generation, they looked at robotics, and basically as a business decision, they had to pick one and they picked robotics.”

“NOAA Labs breakthrough [is a primary focus of the episode].”

“We also talk about the AI industry's seemingly insatiable demand for electricity, and how this is rippling across the entire energy landscape. This is part of the long term trajectory of the energy layout which seems to have been altered, no matter what happens immediately with the conflict in Iran.”

“Apple is planning to open up Siri to third party AI services through the App Store in iOS 27. Basically what this means is that you could have Claude or Gemini or Grok or really any other AI model running your Siri for you, as long as the developer builds integration. You'd essentially be choosing your AI assistant the same way you choose your default browser on iPhones.”

“Iran's ability to control the Strait against a much stronger military is a demonstration that the balance of global power is changing, with profound ramifications for countries around the world. We discuss how different regions are being affected, and how it will change their calculus when it comes to energy security.”

“Amex answered the three hardest questions in agentic commerce: identity, mandate, and accountability. When the agent screws up, who pays? This is the one that matters most, and crypto has obviously not figured it out. Amex says we will pay if you use our rails and the agent screws up. That is what is going to unlock adoption for agentic commerce—the liability and the accountability—especially because the laws in this space are so uncertain and current laws are built for humans swiping cards rather than AI agents.”

“Like many people, I read the letter that he wrote, and it is apologizing for what he's done. It's sort of a goodbye letter to people that he loves. It is imagining, at times, a q and a where he imagines criticism, and then he imagines what he would say in response to that criticism about his actions. That's why this note to his family is so important because he makes pretty clear without ever really saying Trump's name in the writing that Trump is the one he is most angry at.”

“Here, the situation, I think, is quite different in that this person tried to essentially bum rush a fancy black tie gala. He made it a matter of steps past the initial security screening, but he never even got onto the floor where the event was happening. He was taken down and tackled before he could even get to the stairs that led to that floor. So in talking to former secret service and talking to other security experts, a lot of folks have said to me, look. If the question is what do you do to prevent this, this is what the perimeter is for.”

“The first revision to Q4 GDP was cut in half, down to 7 tenths of a percent from 1 percentage point... That's not the kind of mix that supports an economic resilience narrative.”

“Melania Trump brought in the Figure 3 humanoid robot, and it was basically walking around on two feet. It was greeting guests. It was speaking in 11 different languages. Now, I think on the surface, you can really look at this like a PR moment for Figure 3, but I think the reason why it matters is it's a signal of how fast physical AI is moving.”

“The NAR is revising its housing forecast down for the year. That's because the war with Iran has raised the cost of borrowing, and that sent mortgage rates up. The association went from rejecting a double digit increase in existing home sales to just 4%.”

“Well, it was that in fact a nightmare scenario that had been in not only for energy, but for strategic planners for decades had happened. I think it's one of those things that people looked at as a scenario but thought it would never happen, but then it happened. And it does change the world and it changes the way people think about energy. We've had supply chain shocks, but this was the mother of all supply chain shocks in terms of the closure of the Strait Of Hormuz.”

“The biggest story is that there is a data leak at Anthropic, and it revealed a secret model called Claude Mythos. Anthropic's own internal documents describe it as a quote unquote step change in capabilities, and they're saying that it poses an unprecedented cybersecurity risk. This is coming from the safety company, so we're going to unpack all of that on the podcast today.”

“It's not even about smart contract exploits anymore; you can have a million audits and that wasn't the cause of any of these recent attacks. Now it's about all the dependencies around oracles and bridges and collateral and multi-sig configurations or operational security practices. It sort of feels like you're just playing whack-a-mole. North Korea and other illicit actors are just going to keep coming up with new ways, probably greatly aided by AI, to exploit vulnerabilities in the systems surrounding the core code.”

“If you're Saudi, if you're the UAA and you have these alternative routs to Hormus, it's probably one of the better investments that you've made over the past few decades and it's paying off now.”

“I think the second thing, the defense spending will go up, one because they need to replenish on the defense systems that they've been using over the past six weeks. And second because they're realizing that the world is a far more dangerous place than it was six weeks ago.”

“The US Navy now restricting the movement of ships in and out of the Strait Of Hormuz, part of a blockade of Iranian ports announced by president Trump Sunday after peace talks with Iran produced no agreement. Iran has remained defiant, saying it will not surrender to threats from The US.”

“If you have a large portion of the ecosystem, in this case, all of Layer 0's users, if you have something like 47% of them going with this one-of-one verifier setup, it starts to look less like an individualized choice, and more like actually standard architecture, or even the industry norm. I think what courts will eventually have to wrestle with is, when is it not enough to say, oh, we just provided the options, or we provided the tools? Defaults matter, and the options you give actually shape user behavior.”

“One thing has definitely increased, and that is the number of threats just floating around the Internet, the number of threats that go after not just politicians, but, for example, judges and schools and hospitals. And all manner of American public life have a much larger increase in just threats being thrown around. There's sort of a sea of hostility out there online, a sea of angry, threatening language that makes it harder and more time consuming to figure out who is really dangerous and who is just sort of a keyboard commando.”

“The Ninth Circuit heard this, and the other interesting thing is all three judges on this three-judge panel were actually appointed by Trump, but they sounded openly skeptical of the CFTC's federal preemption argument. If we have the Ninth Circuit rule against the prediction markets, and another circuit rule for them, that makes it way more likely that the Supreme Court is going to take on this issue. We’re likely looking at a 2027 or 2028 timeline before we have a final answer on whether these are considered gambling or legal contracts.”

“But I also think part of the challenge here for law enforcement is making the public feel like the president is safe, making the public feel the senior government officials are safe. And if a guy with a shotgun can just sort of storm a security checkpoint and cause a great deal of panic and fear, in that sense, it may be becoming harder and harder for law enforcement to prevent that kind of incident.”

“Trump said the Iranians were closing in on him, but the US forces found him first. They picked him up, flew him out of Iran. Trump says he's safe and sound, though we don't know exactly where he is or the extent of his injuries. Still a lot of details we don't know. The New York Times is reporting that two US planes landed to pick up the injured colonel and the other troops, but were not able to fly out.”

“How can you get in front of these agents? And, like, potentially, there's a lot of value to be captured there in terms of owning that distribution channel. And so they're not really like money Lagos anymore. It's just more like a back end as opposed to, like, composable primitives that developers use in their own smart contracts. So I think the Lego sort of conversation is changing more to, like, a direct to smart contract back end kind of conversation. Like, do you need to compose anymore? Yeah. Maybe maybe you do.”

“NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, who went to space twice as a private astronaut, was on the ship with workers from the US Navy and NASA. It was the first time that the US Navy and NASA had teamed up for a spacecraft recovery since the end of the Apollo lunar program in 1972.”

“I'm here in central Tel Aviv, where hundreds of Israelis came to protest against the war in Iran and Lebanon. They held signs with the faces of Lebanese children killed by the Israeli military, and they went into an underground shelter during a missile attack. Protester Shiri Katz said she believes this war is going nowhere, and despite wanting freedom for Iran, she feels it will not be achieved through this conflict.”

“WTI crew diverse earlier declines to finish up over 3% on the day, just under $100 a barrel.”

“The Ninth Circuit heard this, and the other interesting thing is all three judges on this three-judge panel were actually appointed by Trump, but they sounded openly skeptical of the CFTC's federal preemption argument. If we have the Ninth Circuit rule against the prediction markets, and another circuit rule for them, that makes it way more likely that the Supreme Court is going to take on this issue. We’re likely looking at a 2027 or 2028 timeline before we have a final answer on whether these are considered gambling or legal contracts.”

“Iran's ability to control the Strait against a much stronger military is a demonstration that the balance of global power is changing, with profound ramifications for countries around the world. We discuss how different regions are being affected, and how it will change their calculus when it comes to energy security.”

“So in late April, he gets on a train from Los Angeles, and that goes to Chicago. Once he gets to Chicago, he buys a ticket to Washington, DC. He arrives in Washington, DC on Friday and checks into the hotel, the Washington Hilton. That's the same hotel where this big gala dinner is going to be held.”

“Iran had just basically two simple goals because they were completely cornered, which is basically survival of the system and the terrence so that they don't get attacked again in a few months. And they thought they could achieve this. So it's very very clear goals, very existential.”

“North Korea is actually playing a really big part of this story. So Lazarus Group obtained about $2,000,000,000, in hack proceeds last year from DeFi and crypto. That is a non trivial amount, and the exploits here are getting far, far more sophisticated. So a part of this story is we could be doing better in terms of multisigs. Like, at least on the Kelp DAO side of things, there was a layer zero DBN, which was operated by them, and it was one of one, which was a central point of failure.”

“One thing has definitely increased, and that is the number of threats just floating around the Internet, the number of threats that go after not just politicians, but, for example, judges and schools and hospitals and all manner of American public life have a much larger increase in just threats being thrown around. There's sort of a sea of hostility out there online, a sea of angry, threatening language that makes it harder and more time consuming to figure out who is really dangerous and who is just sort of a keyboard commando.”

“it seems that whatever happens in the short term with this particular conflict, that the region, the Gulf region and the Middle East has already been vastly, vastly changed.”

“The risk was not that Aave had a, you know, a bad multisig or Oracle configuration or anything like that, but, another type of risk, which is the type of collateral that's been onboarded into one mixed pool, it caused these knock on effects. And you're you're essentially looking at a bunch of people right now. This is sort of without precedent. You know, I I I don't think in any of these, maybe, analogs that you could point to and TradFi, you've seen something like this, which is one, everything is a 100% transparent, and you have some folks who are locked a little bit or unable to, you know, unable to to move stuff on the wrapped east side of things.”

“I think someone resurfaced a tweet from Carl Samani this week about him saying that, you know, security doesn't matter. Like, all all that matters is speed. I think for a while, the last few years, the industry has optimized for scalability and speed and whereas in the early days of blockchain, we really optimized for security. And I think that pendulum is swinging back. Now we know that we can have fast chains. I think we now need to work out how we have secure chains, including smart contracts, and that, of course, is under the same umbrella as DeFi.”

“So the mudurithinking about this, the Mudi thinking, you know, this is this is what wars do. They change a lot of things and a lot of perspectives on things, and that goes into corners that we didn't think about before, including architecture.”

“all of these countries are trying to diversify away from oil, and they're sort of sometimes they overlap on the same sectors at times. They have different visions for how to manage the oil wealth, which is important and that sometimes shows up in OPEC plus meetings.”

“He's 31. He's from Torrance, California, and he's, by all accounts, a smart guy. He has a master's in computer science. He went to Caltech, which is not an easy school to get into. We know that he, you know, was raised in the Protestant church, and his father was a church elder. And in talking to people who know him and talked to some of his former students because he worked as a tutor for a good bit of time, they all describe him as nice, cheerful, a bit of a nerd, and all of them that have been interviewed by reporters expressed shock and surprise that the person they knew as this tutor and academic would do anything like this.”

“Aave as evidenced by the launch of v four, is what is the model of lending here? And you have, like, the Cominos and the Morphos of the world who maybe started with a more, isolated markets or, modular approach to lending as opposed to, the more, you know, structured product of of a core. And there are trade offs to both. Right? But I think that's also something that people are thinking about here too. Yeah. Definitely. And, Mike, I know you spent a bit of time in this space, but I also think it's worth pointing out, you know, Aave, you mentioned the asset itself is was the thing that created risk.”

“And so in late April, he gets on a train from Los Angeles, and that goes to Chicago. Once he gets to Chicago, he buys a ticket to Washington, DC. He arrives in Washington, DC on Friday and checks into the hotel, the Washington Hilton. That's the same hotel where this big gala dinner is going to be held.”

“The FAA says antidrone lasers can now be used along The US Southern border. Earlier this year, the agency had shut down airspace in some parts of Texas after the Pentagon deployed the lasers. Now the FAA and Pentagon have signed an agreement that outlines the safety precautions that will be employed.”

“I think accountability is really important and we can't have that unless we're allowed to ask questions. And so we shouldn't be silencing each other every time something like this happens. What about the victims, right? They deserve to know what happened and why and what these teams are going to do about it, what the industry is going to do about it to make sure that it doesn't happen again. We can't just give thoughts and prayers; we need to improve things and ensure accountability for those who lose funds.”

“Some of what unfolds next is actually quite similar to other security scares. People hear what they think are gunshots. They're not sure what's happening. They're not sure where the danger is. But they're told to get down, essentially, like, just get down, you know, lower than your table, so if there is a gunman, he can't see you. And that's what a lot of people in the ballroom are doing in that moment. And, you know, it's basically ninety, one hundred and twenty seconds of of real terror, because no one really knows what the danger is or what direction it's coming from.”

“I think from the industry point of view, they saw there there are major dislocations, and those dislocations are playing out unevenly across the world. Asia hit the hardest, Europe feeling it, and then The US mainly seen it in terms of rising prices at the gasoline pump, but no problem getting supplies. But in Asia, a big problem getting supplies.”

“Democratic California congressman Eric Swalwell and Texas Republican Tony Gonzalez are stepping down from their house seats, both bowing to pressure to leave congress or face expulsion following sexual misconduct allegations.”

“Consumer prices in March were up 3.3% from a year ago. That's the biggest annual increase in almost two years. Prices jumped nine tenths of a percent between February and March with a spike in gasoline prices accounting for nearly three quarters of that increase. Gas prices have jumped by more than a dollar a gallon since The US and Israel launched their war on Iran.”