recap/history/1775588771329-NBu8G-5YpGI.json

{"id":"1775588771329-NBu8G-5YpGI","videoId":"NBu8G-5YpGI","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBu8G-5YpGI","title":"The Iran War is Accelerating the End of Globalism | Jacob Shapiro","type":"youtube","topicCount":13,"segmentCount":206,"createdAt":"2026-04-07T19:06:11.329Z","uploadDate":"20260407","chunks":[{"title":"Introduction and Show Teaser","summary":"The host introduces the episode with a teaser from geopolitical analyst Jacob Shapiro. They discuss the recent resurgence of geopolitics, setting the stage for a deep dive into the Iran crisis and its global market impacts.","entries":[{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: It literally did not come into my imagination that this would be a longer war, that this would be a war for longer than three to four weeks, because the asymmetry of the advantages here go in Iran's favor. But all that really matters right now is how many ships are going in and out of the strait.","offset":0,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Physical shortages are starting to show up in East Asian economies. And if we keep going on this path, if we are still here in a month talking about this, we'll be talking about those shortages moving from East Asia to Europe, even to the Western Hemisphere.","offset":13,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: There's a scenario here where maybe President Trump talks tomorrow or in the next week or two, and yet the disruptions that we're talking about are only just beginning because the global supply chain disruptions will move from a conversation about the Strait of Hormuz to what Ukraine is doing to Russia.","offset":25,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So it's an acceleration of deglobalization, it's an acceleration of multipolarity. You are looking for those places in the world that are on a relative basis will perform better when there is an energy choke point disruption.","offset":43,"duration":8},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Certainty and stability will not be coming from Washington or will not be guaranteed by Washington going forward. It's the end of an era. But it seems to me that the best case scenario coming out of all this is...","offset":51,"duration":12},{"text":"Host: Nothing said on Forward Guidance is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by NOM on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks.","offset":63,"duration":7},{"text":"Host: Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. As always, investments and blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Do your own research.","offset":70,"duration":26},{"text":"Host: All right everybody, welcome back to another episode of Forward Guidance. And joining me this week is Jacob Shapiro, independent geopolitical analyst, as well as the host of the Jacob Shapiro podcast and Geopolitical Cousins, which is by far my favorite geopolitical podcast.","offset":96,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: I do not miss an episode. You and Marco are just awesome. Reminds me a lot of what I do on the Roundup every week with the other co-hosts Quinn and Tyler, where we just chop it up, banter, and try to navigate the endless headlines. So super excited to have you on.","offset":106,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: You know, it's always funny when—it would be interesting to look at the correlation of when geopolitical experts come on podcasts versus like the degree of, I don't know, shit hitting the fan in the world. I'm sure it's just—I'm sure you've looked at it before, but it's always interesting. But yeah, excited to have you on the show, Jacob.","offset":122,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Thanks for having me. I don't know that I can promise much guidance, but it can certainly be forward. And yeah, I find that the pace of—I mean, obviously the last month has been nuts, but really ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, it feels like it has not let up in terms of being asked to come on and speak to either audiences or to do interviews. Like that was, that was definitely the moment where the world woke up and said, \"Geopolitics is back.\"","offset":138,"duration":26},{"text":"Host: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Geopolitics is back. And back more than ever right now over the last month. So obviously the topic du jour is Iran and everything going on there and the Strait of Hormuz.","offset":164,"duration":12}],"startTime":0},{"title":"The US-Iran Conflict and Asymmetric Warfare","summary":"Jacob details his initial framework for the US-Iran conflict, explaining why he didn't foresee a long war. He highlights Iran's asymmetric advantages, specifically its control over the Strait of Hormuz and its use of cost-effective military hardware against expensive US weaponry.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Would love for for those that just have not been as tuned into how you've been thinking about this crisis and the development of it. If you could just walk through your initial framework going into the initial strikes day in February, and then just how the sequence of events have evolved and how your framework has evolved up to basically now the first week of April.","offset":176,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, I'll try to make this succinct, and if I'm failing, I hope you will, you know, get the hook in here and get me off or tell me to be quiet. And I'll also just give you by way of background, I'm a global analyst now, and I'm especially in the last couple of years have been directly tying geopolitical analysis to active investing and investment positions and things like that.","offset":190,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But I cut my teeth as a Middle East analyst. My academic training is in the Middle East, my languages expertise is all in the Middle East. And it's always been funny to me that as a geopolitical analyst, in some sense the Middle East—I think I certainly analyze it and understand it well.","offset":212,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: From a predictive standpoint, it's—by far my worst region. And I think there's something to be said for knowing too much about a thing. It puts you too close to the action, you're almost too smart for your own good. You can't get that same degree of global macro when you're too attached to it.","offset":228,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Which is my way of excusing myself for thinking I didn't think that the United States was going to undertake this war. I didn't think that because I thought they knew that the implications would be, well, I didn't even think catastrophic. I thought that they knew that it would be a short-term war and that they probably wouldn't be able to achieve their objectives.","offset":246,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: It literally did not come into my imagination that this would be a longer war, that this would be a war for longer than three to four weeks, because the asymmetry of the advantages here go in Iran's favor.","offset":259,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: For the first two or three weeks, the United States and Israel together lit up Iran, and it was all about firepower, epic fury. I'm old enough to remember when we did this in the second Gulf War. That was the period of the war that was always going to be very successful and very impressive for the United States military.","offset":271,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But two to three weeks in, then Iran's asymmetric advantages start to assert themselves. Their first and most important advantage is the Strait of Hormuz, is geography. And unless the United States has invented a weapon that separates Iran from control of the Strait of Hormuz, you can have all the shiny weapons you want and blow up all the power plants you want.","offset":287,"duration":20},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: You're going to be fighting with a power that can upend the global economy by saying no ship shall go through the strait, which is exactly kind of what we're living through right this moment.","offset":307,"duration":9},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And then the second asymmetric advantage, and this is something we already saw with Russia and Ukraine, we saw it with the Houthis being able to resist the United States and block shipping through the Red Sea. We've seen it in all kinds of conflicts in recent years.","offset":316,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The United States may have very fancy interceptors and F-35s and all sorts of things that cost all amounts of money to develop. The Iranians have relatively, by comparison, unsophisticated rockets and missiles and drones and they cost far less.","offset":327,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And they can deploy much higher numbers of these things versus very fancy and expensive US military hardware where you get to the point where they're now beginning to see more bang for their buck or their rial or their yuan or Bitcoin, whatever you want to throw in there.","offset":343,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: They're getting more bang for their buck because we've exhausted a lot of those higher-end things and they can just keep throwing out the cheap stuff. And that means that even as you decimate their navy and their air force and their launchers, as long as they've got a certain capacity left and people willing to fire them, they're going to keep firing.","offset":358,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And you're seeing that happen in real time right now. So that's a big intro by way of saying that I didn't think this was going to happen because I thought the United States had learned from previous mistakes.","offset":374,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I also took President Trump—my bad—at his word that this was a guy who campaigned on not going into wars in the Middle East and wasting trillions of dollars on American lives on fools' errands in the Middle East. And he got me, the bait and switch is on.","offset":384,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it's, nope, it's war in the Middle East and this is absolutely critical. And by the way, the last thing I'd just say is, you know, second Iraq war at least you had the excuse of US energy insecurity being the geopolitical reasoning behind it.","offset":396,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: There's no reason for the United States to be messing around the Strait of Hormuz. Since the shale revolution, the United States is a net exporter of crude, it's been keeping the lights on in Europe by exporting LNG. Yes, there are still global economic exposures based on the things that are blocked out of the Strait of Hormuz, but there's no compelling reason to be obsessed with Persian Gulf oil if you're the United States, which took another geopolitical reason off the board to engage in this conflict.","offset":411,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But yet, it's April 6th, the war's been going on for, what, five, six weeks now, and we're 24 hours from a Trump taco or from Trump obliterating the country or something in between. So there we are.","offset":428,"duration":15}],"startTime":176},{"title":"Tracking Geopolitics for Macro Investors","summary":"Jacob provides a framework for analyzing geopolitical events, splitting his focus into macro trends like multipolarity and short-term indicators. He emphasizes that the most critical metric right now is the physical volume of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.","entries":[{"text":"Host: There we are. Okay, that's a great foundation. I want to move in and isolate towards understanding what are the actual important things to look at for economic slash market consequences.","offset":443,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: So you mentioned how you are very focused on understanding how to track these geopolitical events and in moving them towards some sort of tangible investment frameworks or macro analysis. Obviously this is a macro podcast, so the number one question I think that people listening to this are trying to figure out is: Okay, there's a million headlines a day right now, some of them move markets, some of them don't. There's a lot of stuff moving in a lot of different parts here. How do you isolate into the things that are actually meaningful towards global macroeconomics and markets?","offset":454,"duration":31},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, I want to answer that question in two ways. The first is at a—is at a macro time horizon. And when I say macro time horizon, I mean over a three to five year time horizon. So I did not think the United States was going to invade Iran, but from a positional perspective, I'm doing okay because I was long energy, I was long fertilizer, I was long food.","offset":485,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Like all of the things that are being affected by this, I was long for other reasons entirely, which tells you that this is exacerbating those things. It's making things move more quickly than I expected. But if anything, it's an accelerant, it's not a disruptor in that sense.","offset":506,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: We were already moving towards deglobalization. We were already moving towards multipolarity of supply chains. We were already seeing the securitization of things like food and semiconductors and feedstocks.","offset":519,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: All these things becoming part of the conversation about national security and countries that can protect those supply chains or make themselves self-sufficient in them, you were seeing those moves anyway.","offset":532,"duration":7},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And so I think over a three to five year time horizon, all that's happened is an acceleration of those trends that we were already watching. So it's an acceleration of deglobalization, it's an acceleration of multipolarity. You are looking for those places in the world that are on a relative basis will perform better when there is an energy choke point disruption in the Middle East, or who are going to perform better when there is—when there are rising food prices.","offset":539,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And conversely, you're also looking for those markets and countries that are not going to perform well. The countries that are able to assure cheap supply and secure supply of energy, cheap and secure supply of food, and are able to invest in the cutting edge of technology. Those are your countries that are going to be net winners over a three to five year time horizon. We could talk about those countries, those markets, those companies, verticals if you want.","offset":561,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Then there's our shorter term time horizon, which is: There's a lot of noise in the media and it's being generated by the White House, it's being generated by the IRGC, it's being generated by governments all over the place.","offset":582,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But all that really matters is how many ships are going in and out of the strait. And a week ago it was basically zero. It has ticked up a little bit in the last two to three days. Whether that is because the Iranians have this tolling system active and they are accepting payment for that, or whether it's ships that are running through because they think the Iranians can't cash the threats that they're making.","offset":593,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: There's probably some combination of both there. You are seeing an uptick in the ships that are going through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, we are still at something like 20% of what is normal. So don't think for a second that this is normalized.","offset":611,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And don't think for a second, by the way, that we have up-to-date information on the damage that has already been done to infrastructure in the region. Let's say the war stopped in an hour. The first thing I want to know is: Okay, how damaged are the LNG facilities in Qatar? How damaged are the gas fields in Iran and some of these other places?","offset":624,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: How long will it take to fix these things? Are we talking about turbines that have to be reordered, or are we talking about fixes that can happen on a time span of months? So there just is a lot of uncertainty that we're dealing with there. And I think the market is communicating that uncertainty to you in a bit.","offset":641,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Markets have been sanguine and almost delusional from my perspective. The disconnect between markets and the physical economies has never been more obvious, because the physical economy, especially in places that were over—overdependent on the region for a lot of these things.","offset":655,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The physical economies are starting to show the cracks. I mean, physical shortages are starting to show up in East Asian economies. And if we keep going on this path, if we are still here in a month talking about this, we'll be talking about those shortages moving from East Asia to Europe, even to the Western Hemisphere for all of the talk about US energy self-sufficiency as well.","offset":669,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So at the long-term perspective, you have to have that macro model about where the world is moving. Mine is multipolarity. There are others out there. And then for the short term, it's really just are ships going in and out of the strait. Period. And those are the things that I'm trying to keep my mind on at the same time.","offset":691,"duration":16}],"startTime":443},{"title":"The End of US Maritime Security","summary":"Discussing reports of ships paying tolls to bypass blockades, Jacob suggests this signifies a transition away from US-guaranteed maritime security. He expects a new, localized tolling structure to emerge as the best-case scenario for stability.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Yeah, 100%. I totally agree that the main vector to look at is counting ships. And it's an interesting one when I look at how the market has been digesting that idea over the last few weeks.","offset":707,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: As it feels like over the last three weeks or so there is an acceptance that there was almost no flow through the strait. And then over the past few days, I've started to see two vectors start to accelerate.","offset":718,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: One of those vectors being this idea of a dark fleet that is turning off their AIS and running the strait, whether they just had some sort of, you know, under the table agreement with Iran to let them go through. Or there's the more formal pact of what's going on with, say, you know, what you would assume are US allies, like France, have struck a deal with Iran to be able to start to move some of their oil through.","offset":729,"duration":20},{"text":"Host: So I'm curious: How do you think about those two vectors and how do you discount the validity or just quantify how to measure those?","offset":749,"duration":9},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: It's really difficult and I'm not brave enough to go to the strait myself and test some of these things against each other. But you have reputable sources that are saying that at least some ships are paying a toll, and that they're paying the toll in yuan to get through.","offset":758,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that the IRGC has a system for doing this, that they have country rankings based on how close they are to the United States or how Iran views their relationships with that country, and that affects the fee that you have to pay. So there are, you know, open-source reports from reputable sources that say that is happening.","offset":773,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Now, you have to take everything with a grain of salt here because it's the fog of war, but that's happening. Then you also, to your point, have reports about, you know, ships that are just running—are making a run for it. And they're getting through. Is that a testament to their bravery?","offset":789,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Is that because to your point they have a tacit understanding that the IRGC is not going to go after them at this point in time? Maybe they can't. Maybe they're focused on other things. Okay, like all open questions here.","offset":801,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But yeah, I don't have a solid answer for you. Like we have to be comfortable I think with the uncertainty. But it seems to me that the best case scenario coming out of all this is some type of tolling structure, whether it's wholly Iran or whether it's some kind of Iran-GCC combo toll, that returns certainty to transiting the Strait of Hormuz.","offset":815,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it's crazy to me because that means the best case scenario we're talking about is: You're no longer thinking that the United States Navy is there to guarantee global shipping lanes and maritime choke points.","offset":836,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: You want there to be some kind of localized tolling facility, even if it's with the ayatollahs of Iran, a group of not particularly nice people. Like you'd rather know, \"Okay, this is what I pay, this is what I do, and I get through the Strait of Hormuz.\" Like certainty and stability is what's going to be the best case scenario coming out of this.","offset":848,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that certainty and stability will not be coming from Washington or will not be guaranteed by Washington going forward. And for some countries I guess that'll be good, but for most of the world and for the United States, which has profited off of US-led and protected globalization, it's the end of an era in some sense.","offset":863,"duration":18}],"startTime":707},{"title":"Conflict Contagion and Supply Chain Brittleness","summary":"Zooming out to the broader geopolitical landscape, Jacob explains how regional conflicts are bleeding into one another, such as Ukraine targeting Russian petrochemicals. He warns that already brittle global supply chains are highly vulnerable to secondary shocks like extreme weather.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's a great point and just to zoom out into this secular trend that you mentioned of deglobalization and multipolarity is: Okay, you have this basis that the Strait of Hormuz has had this degree of security guarantees from the overall American apparatus for decades now.","offset":881,"duration":19},{"text":"Host: And that apparatus and those security guarantees are on the margin moving away. And then we have to figure out and discount: Okay, how much is it going to move towards this new world where Iran is the one or maybe in some sort of agreement with Oman, they're the ones running the toll booth now?","offset":900,"duration":13},{"text":"Host: And pairing that with who are actually dependent on the strait, which is, i.e., you know, Europe and they have to decide who do they align with, and then also East Asian markets and who they have to decide who to align with.","offset":913,"duration":13},{"text":"Host: And I'm curious about how you're thinking about how all these different countries net out. Because again, there's—you know, there's been interesting stuff what's been going on with the UN Security Council this week where you had them trying to vote about whether to intervene with outright force or not.","offset":926,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: And you saw actually, you know, France aligning with China and Russia for example. So these traditional lines of, you know, the West versus the East or however you want to define it just don't seem as consistent anymore. So I'm just curious: How do you see this whole framing net out over the next few years? It just seems completely convoluted.","offset":942,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, well first things first, like who cares what the United Nations says. I mean, it's like the Dave Chappelle Black Bush sketch, like \"Sanction me! Sanction me with your army! Oh, you don't have an army! Okay, cool.\" So I don't really care what the UN says.","offset":959,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: No, I think here we also have to widen the aperture a little bit because the Russia-Ukraine war is also ongoing. And one of the things that has made me more optimistic in a multipolar world is that I expected you would get these types of small regional conflicts, but that they would be relatively self-contained.","offset":972,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So the Russia-Ukraine war, despite—you know—myriad articles written about the beginning of World War III, it's a Russia-Ukraine war. It's a war between those two actors. Yes, some countries are supporting the other side with weapons, but it's Russian soldiers, Ukrainian soldiers, and those poor North Koreans that the Russians imported.","offset":989,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: One of the things that's different about this conflict is you're starting to see the bleed over. And this is something I don't think markets have really quite gotten through their head. Because Ukraine is watching everything that's happening in the Strait of Hormuz, and I imagine that Zelenskyy—you know—I'm imagining here, I don't—I don't know this for sure.","offset":1005,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But I imagine Zelenskyy's watching the situation and watching Iran's asymmetric—asymmetric advantage work and thinking to himself, \"Oh, if I can affect the global price of oil or petrochemical supply chains or things like that, people will listen to me even if I'm being blown up by the United States and Israel, even though my air force is gone and everything else like that.\"","offset":1019,"duration":19},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: \"Cool. So instead of hitting Russian energy infrastructure that makes life harder for the everyday Russian citizen,\" which is what Ukraine has been doing for the past 12 months, trying to drive up the price of gasoline for the average Russian consumer, hitting that infrastructure.","offset":1038,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: \"I'm going to go after Russian oil export infrastructure. I'm going to go after Russian petrochemical export infrastructure because then maybe people will start listening to what I want.\"","offset":1051,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: \"I also don't want Vladimir Putin to profit from higher oil prices. I don't want the Europeans to hang me out to dry by having to go back to Moscow and saying, 'We really don't like you, but we kind of need your oil and natural gas and fertilizers and everything else again. So let's let bygones be bygones and we'll try and muzzle the Ukrainians and threaten support and things like that.'\"","offset":1062,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: All of which is to say this now goes from Russia—excuse me—Israel-US versus Iran with some GCC states game theory into also Russia versus Ukraine and the powers that are on either side of that.","offset":1079,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it just starts to get unwieldy when you think about all the different circumstances that are there. So yeah, I mean, there is a—there is a scenario here where maybe President Trump talks tomorrow or in the next week or two, and yet the disruptions that we're talking about are only just beginning because the global supply chain disruptions will move from a conversation about the Strait of Hormuz to what Ukraine is doing to Russia and what that means in general.","offset":1094,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And then just layer on top of that—I'm not usually a doomer here, but it's very hard not to at least engage in the doomer scenarios to be ready for them. I mean, let's say all that's happening and then it's hurricane season in the United States, and what if a hurricane, you know, hits the Gulf and some capacity of US exports goes offline?","offset":1118,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Like we don't even have to do anything nefarious about cyberattacks or electromagnetic pulses or all the crazy things that the doomers want to do. Let's just say it's a weather formation and a storm knocks off some percentage of US exports.","offset":1136,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Now you're dealing with a global economy where things are already very lean, everybody's already on edge, and that one sort of bastion of supply that is far away from the geopolitical conflict gets hit. Okay, and now we're off to the races.","offset":1147,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So just every single one of these things increases the brittleness of global supply chains. And that's a story that we've—you know—I've also been tracking for quite some time as well. So that's how I would think about widening the aperture and thinking about international interest. Certainly don't think about what the UN has to say. They have no power here.","offset":1161,"duration":17}],"startTime":881},{"title":"Supply Chain Risks: LNG, Fertilizer, and Plastics","summary":"Jacob breaks down the global supply chains most at risk from ongoing conflicts. While less concerned about oil due to strategic reserves, he highlights severe vulnerabilities in LNG, agricultural fertilizers, and lower-tier petrochemicals like plastics.","entries":[{"text":"Host: That's super helpful. Okay, yeah, I do want to ratchet down one level towards those specific supply chains and understand and map out.","offset":1178,"duration":8},{"text":"Host: You know, I feel like just as a general tourist to this space and trying to read the news articles and understand what's going on, a lot of headlines are really focused on the price of oil and less so on some of these more downstream impacts, whether it's the fertilizer market or helium and the LNG space and things like that.","offset":1186,"duration":17},{"text":"Host: So I'm just curious if you could just map out for us when you look at these different lists of supply chain issues, which ones do you feel like are rightly an issue? Which ones do you feel like are not being paid enough attention to? And yeah, like which ones are you most concerned about here?","offset":1203,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, um, I mean, it's impossible to map them all out without putting listeners to sleep. But let's sort of talk about some of the big categories. The big ones. Because even in a crisis, like supply chains are for nerds. Like this is—you don't go into college being like, \"I'm going to be an expert on supply chains.\"","offset":1220,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Oil, look, oil's important. In some ways, it's the one that I'm least worried about, not least because you have countries with strategic reserves. Four to five million barrels per day are crossing that pipeline and getting out through Yanbu, at least for now.","offset":1237,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: If the Houthis get involved and if the Red Sea is shut, okay, like we can—we can start sounding the alarm there. I certainly think we'll see elevated oil prices through the end of the year. But in some sense, like that's the one that maybe I'm least worried about.","offset":1251,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: LNG is a—is different because you're not piping LNG to Yanbu across—across the desert. And Europe really—like Europe was depending on access to all the LNG capacity coming online out of this.","offset":1263,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: That's how they were going to balance the lack of supply that was coming from Russia. And that doesn't mean that the Europeans are going to go cold in the winter. What it means is they're going to pay higher spot prices for these things, even if it's from China rerouting some of what they're getting over there.","offset":1279,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that means your emerging markets that were betting that they were going to have access to some of this LNG are going to have to start scrambling themselves, whether that's, you know, coal or what Pakistan has done with solar in the last couple of years. They're the ones that are going to be scrambling, that are going to be hurt the worst.","offset":1292,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Fertilizer's a big deal. Fertilizer is another one of these very lean supply chains where you don't have strategic fertilizer reserves. Fertilizer's really only relevant one or two times a year based on when farmers are planting and when they need the fertilizer.","offset":1309,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And so that's when the supply chain is there for them. We already missed the window for many farmers throughout the world to apply fertilizer. So you can book in now lower yields in many parts of the world and rising food prices in those parts of the world.","offset":1321,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And we won't know the full impact of that from six to nine months till now. But just a reminder that the Arab Spring began with rising food prices in the Middle East. It was a Tunisian vegetable salesman who self-immolated that started the Arab Spring because food prices were too high and because that vegetable salesman didn't feel like they could make a living and then they got insulted by police and we were off to the races.","offset":1336,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Um, so I think that potential six to nine months down the road in emerging markets for thinking about some of that type of political disruption, that's there and that ties directly to fertilizer. And then the last major category is the petrochemical complex.","offset":1351,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that spans everything from, you know, boring things like plastic and plastics and resins to higher value input things like helium that you're talking about that are critical for semiconductor manufacturing.","offset":1365,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And, I mean, this is still a thesis that I'm building, but in some sense I'm less worried about things like helium because helium's important enough that there are strategic reserves out there. And at least the reporting I've seen and my contacts in the space seem to be—I mean, optimistic is the wrong point of view—but not freaking out.","offset":1378,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: In my Rolodex, the folks that are freaking out are those ones for those mid-to-lower tier petrochemical products that you would think are boring, like the plastic that's in everything in your life, which you're seeing doubling and tripling of prices.","offset":1394,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Or you're seeing companies that are saying, \"I just can't get it. Like it's not available for any price, or I have to go to China or I have to go to some weird place before that maybe that's going to run afoul of global sanctions in order to—in order to get it.\"","offset":1409,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that again is—these are products for which there's no strategic reserve. Nobody was sitting there being like, \"Yeah, I need a strategic plastic polymer reserve because I need to make sure that I have plastics that I can wrap the food in that I'm selling at the grocery store.\"","offset":1421,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But that's where it's going to start showing up, because those are the things where things are very lean. And by the way, like the whatever you think about globalization and free trade, we could argue till we're blue in the face: Is it good, is it bad?","offset":1433,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The thing about free trade, the thing that makes it efficient, that the bulls will say about free trade is, yeah, that's exactly how it's supposed to work. You produce what you need, when you need it, for the cheapest price possible, in the geographies that are most optimized for that production.","offset":1444,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that's the way a lot of supply chains are. Even though the world is moving multipolar, lots of supply chains still function like it's a globalized world. So when you have this kind of crisis and this level of supply chain disruption, you're dealing with supply chains that are expecting a perfect globalized free trade world of the 1990s.","offset":1459,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And instead they're getting this version of multipolarity and regional warfare and return of great power politics of 2026. Now, those supply chains will change. Trade is like water, it will find cracks, it will figure out the way it needs to get from Point A to Point B.","offset":1474,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But just like water, water can be very destructive when it's trying to find those cracks. Levees can break, walls can crash down, you can inundate entire areas as those things try and get from Point A to Point B.","offset":1489,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And usually it's your emerging markets, your countries that have lower buffers, that don't have strategic reserves, that are already constrained from a fiscal position. Those are the countries that are going to be front and center, and then you'll get relative degrees of pain depending on where you are and what your self-sufficiency is. So that's—that's my best way of trying to very succinctly putting a bow around global supply chains and which ones are affected.","offset":1499,"duration":22}],"startTime":1178},{"title":"Podcast Sponsor Ad Break","summary":"The host reads promotional messages for the podcast's sponsors, Arkham and Blockworks Investor Relations.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Before you place a trade, you should know who is actually moving the market. That's where Arkham comes in. Arkham is a crypto intelligence platform and exchange that lets you see real on-chain data, which wallets are buying, selling, and moving funds, and then trade directly on that information.","offset":1521,"duration":15},{"text":"Host: Arkham was built to make blockchains human readable. Instead of raw transaction data, you get clear profiles, visualizers, and custom dashboards that show what's really happening beneath the surface. Tracking wallets and fund flows is becoming just as important as technical or fundamental analysis.","offset":1536,"duration":15},{"text":"Host: On-chain intelligence is also one of the best tools traders have to protect themselves against hacks, rugs, and scams. With Arkham Exchange, you can go from insight to execution in one place: the world's first exchange powered by crypto intelligence. Check out Arkham and start trading with real on-chain insight at arkham.com.","offset":1551,"duration":18},{"text":"Host: Blockworks co-founder Michael Ippolito here. Quick break to talk about something we've just launched: Blockworks Investor Relations. As the market shifts toward institutional capital, investors want more transparency, more standardization, and a higher level of professionalism.","offset":1569,"duration":13},{"text":"Host: But the traditional IR model is slow, manual, and not built for how crypto works. If you're building on-chain, your data is already live, your business is already transparent. The challenge is turning that into a clear, credible story for investors. That's exactly what we're solving with Blockworks IR.","offset":1582,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: It's a single platform that brings together real-time analytics, branded investor portals, and hands-on advisory support so you can communicate what matters. If you're an on-chain business looking to level up your investor strategy, check out Blockworks Investor Relations at blockworks.com/investor-relations. All right, back to the episode.","offset":1598,"duration":19}],"startTime":1521},{"title":"Economic Timelines and US Political Constraints","summary":"Discussing how long the global economy can endure disruptions before structural damage occurs, Jacob points to the political vulnerability of the US administration. He notes that domestic inflation and high gas prices pose severe risks for the incumbent party heading into the midterms.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Awesome, that's great. I don't think we put anybody to sleep there. That was compelling to myself anyway, so I'm sure everybody's still awake.","offset":1617,"duration":7},{"text":"Host: The big question that hand that comes from that for me is understanding the timeline that we have that we can work around this. You know, obviously you mentioned a lot of the really key strategic ones have those reserves associated with it, and then there's the more downstream ones that don't have any reserves associated with it.","offset":1624,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: So I'm just curious: How do you think about the timeline for how much working time we have? Or how much you—how much you think maybe the Trump and Israel are thinking about how much time they have for this operation before it's like, \"Oh crap, we're really doing some structural damage. Like, there is no inventory in these certain important assets and we're really screwed here.\" What does that timeline look like for you?","offset":1640,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Well, let's break those in two, because Israel doesn't care. Israel cares that this rival that has threatened to wipe it off the map—so I'm not ascribing a value judgment here—but Israel views Iran as an existential threat, and all it wants to see, if not regime change, then it will take chaos and obliteration. Like that is a net positive from Israel's point of view. It will deal with the economic catastrophe that comes in.","offset":1662,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Israel is a country that is relatively well-off. Ever since their discovery of offshore gas, it's removed one of their key vulnerabilities in terms of inputs, and they're actually in a pretty good position.","offset":1683,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: As for the United States, I mean, this really comes down to psychoanalysis on some level and who Trump is listening to and what he thinks. Because based on what I understand, I think we're already flirting with disaster.","offset":1694,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Um, you know, I think if you're looking at most of these things, if you don't have this war wrapped up in two to three weeks, you know, you're probably talking about physical shortages for many of the things that we just talked about.","offset":1707,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And when I say two-three weeks, like you have to then assume that there is an escalation in that time period or that you don't get further damage to infrastructure that makes restarting all that much harder, which is pretty hard to imagine considering the rhetoric that is going back and forth between the sides.","offset":1719,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: All of which is to say, you know, the constraints point to this being resolved two weeks ago. But President Trump has not resolved it. He's doubled down and tripled down and he's, you know, he's threatening—I mean, I forget the exact words that he used in that tweet yesterday—but I mean, just kind of insane the level of threats that he's raising against Iran.","offset":1733,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: You've got a trillion and a half dollar defense budget that's coming—I mean, he's not acting like somebody who's about to throw in the towel. Now, maybe it's the art of the deal. Maybe the art of the deal is beyond me. But there's that.","offset":1751,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But yeah, if we're here two-three weeks from now talking about the same things, and you know, we could still be talking about the war and shipping has gone back not to normal, but goes back to 60-70% and the Iranians are only striking certain types of targets that are connected to Israel and the United States.","offset":1762,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Okay, like now we're talking about some kind of resumption. But yeah, I'm worried that we're already off the cliff, and even the folks I think that are pretty sober and optimistic about this would be the first to admit, \"Yeah, if we're here on May 1st and we're still talking about this, the global economy is going to be—is going to be majorly affected.\"","offset":1778,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And as for the last thing just, it is obvious to me that President Trump and this administration is thinking that the United States is safe from this because of the shale revolution and because the United States is not dependent on importing oil and LNG from the Persian Gulf.","offset":1794,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it's just such a facile and feeble point of view. You can argue that the United States needs to Make America Great Again and nearshore or reshore all this industrial capacity back to the United States and everything else. Cool, it hasn't happened yet in the Year of Our Lord 2026, and this supply chain disruption is here right now.","offset":1809,"duration":20},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The United States is exposed to the global economy. And yes, maybe the United States has some fundamental factors that mean it can weather it on paper a little bit better, but Joe Biden learned just how hard it is to weather things on paper versus when people are at the gas pump and being like, \"Hey, it's five dollars to pump at the gas tank,\" or eggs have gone to this.","offset":1829,"duration":23},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Watching President Trump try and lecture the American public that everything's fine with the economy. I mean, he's doing the exact same thing that Biden did in 2022, which is the exact reason that we have President Trump 2.0 in the first place.","offset":1852,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: All of which is to say, US politics is way more brittle than the US strategic position. We're going into the midterms. Trump is at terribly low approval ratings, and even worse for him, he's at terribly low approval ratings on his handling of the economy.","offset":1866,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: No matter what people thought about him, he always got good ratings on, \"Oh, this guy is going to handle the economy better than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton or any of these others.\" Those numbers are now where they were at for Joe Biden in 2022.","offset":1880,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Um, so at least from a domestic political constraint point of view, you would think that he would see the disaster that is coming in November and would start to change course. But it seems, you know, if I'm just doing psychoanalysis and reading what he's doing, it doesn't seem to me like it's art of the deal.","offset":1893,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: It seems to me like he really believes that the tariffs worked and that America is great again and that he is presiding over the greatest—you know—economic Renaissance in the history of the country. And I'm sorry, like I'll take the other side. I don't think that's true. But I think he's operating from that standpoint.","offset":1906,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Yeah. I mean, that's the ultimate head-scratcher is that it's—I mean, yeah, you just set to pull a polymarket look for two seconds and you're going to see that they're the polling is going to go terrible for the midterms for them. And it's just such a—it's just such a head-scratcher.","offset":1920,"duration":13}],"startTime":1617},{"title":"Ignoring Geopolitical Noise for Real Indicators","summary":"The host asks about impending negotiation deadlines between the US and Iran. Jacob advises ignoring political posturing and reality TV ultimatums, reiterating the importance of tracking physical shortages and real commodity prices instead.","entries":[{"text":"Host: I'm curious so: Yeah, what is your—what is your framework for heading into the \"quote-unquote\" negotiations happening right now between Iran and the US via Pakistan and this—this potential deadline approach of tomorrow, so Tuesday, I think at 8 o'clock or something like that Eastern, is sort of this—this do-or-die moment for getting some sort of agreement between the two parties.","offset":1933,"duration":25},{"text":"Host: And I'm just curious like: How do you view the framework to head into that negotiation and what's actually really going on there? Because there's just so much noise around it. So is it—you know—you just look at this timeline acuteness that we just unpacked? Is it something to do with: Okay, we really got to get this wrapped up in the next couple weeks or so because midterms are in November and we need to try to, you know, put out the fires that we've just self-inflicted on ourselves by then or, you know, just have enough runway? Like, how do you think about all that?","offset":1958,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I'm opting out of the reality TV show presidency. I stayed up late what was that Friday or whatever he was doing the White House press—you know—the press conference from the Oval or from the White House or whatever it was because he was going to make some announcement it was going to be ground troops.","offset":1982,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it wasn't, it was just President Trump being President Trump. And he has a knack for creating these inflection points, these moments where everybody's talking about him and everybody's focused on this thing. I'm not buying it. Like I'm buying our ships coming out in and out of the Strait of Hormuz.","offset":1994,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Does Iran feel like it's done enough to either re-establish deterrence or is it making progress in getting reaching some kind of modus vivendi with Oman and GCC states about where this goes from here?","offset":2008,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: If you're just reading the plain objectives of both sides, I don't think Iran feels like it has caused enough pain to the global economy to re-establish deterrence, and I don't think the United States is acting like a country that is able to declare mission achieved or—you know—mission objectives achieved quite yet.","offset":2020,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So that tells me that, you know, maybe there's negotiations going on, but it doesn't look like either side is ready to bend. Maybe I'm reading that wrong. Maybe Iran actually is hurting much worse than I think, and Iran feels like it's done enough and maybe it's got, you know, back channelers from the—from the Gulf states that make them feel like they can do that.","offset":2037,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Maybe President Trump really does believe like he's achieved his objectives and he can end this particular season of the reality TV show and move on to the next episode. But yeah, I'm opting out of these \"Oh, tomorrow's the inflection point.\"","offset":2054,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Because for all we know, he'll come on tomorrow and be like, \"I've extended the deadline another two days, but Thursday is now, you know, bridge obliteration day.\" Like, okay. How many straits are coming in or—excuse me—how many ships are coming in and out of the Strait of Hormuz?","offset":2066,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: What is the price of jet fuel in Singapore? What is the difference between, you know, Asian futures and and what Brent crude is showing us: market versus physical shortages. Like that's what I'm interested ultimately. And when that stuff starts going back, you'll probably be able to see the politicians starting to change their tunes.","offset":2080,"duration":15}],"startTime":1933},{"title":"Global Winners and Losers in a Multipolar World","summary":"Jacob assesses how different regions will fare amid ongoing supply chain disruptions. He remains bullish on the long-term economic prospects of the US and China, identifies emerging opportunities in countries like Chile, and expresses optimism for Europe's ability to adapt.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Hmm. To that point, obviously, yeah, there's a lot of more esoteric markets like you mentioned, like Singapore jet oil, that have gone absolutely bananas.","offset":2095,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: But then there's also other things like, you know, US equities are, you know, barely down from all-time highs. And I'm just curious about: When you net out everything that exists today and how it's—how it's been discounted?","offset":2105,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: And if we can get to this point where markets can forward-look to a point where there is this like weird new world of a gray zone around the Strait of Hormuz where there is partly this toll thing, but then also not?","offset":2115,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: And, you know, when you net it all out stuff is getting through the strait. Like that world that we get into and you net it with all the damage that has been done—you know—there was like 20 billion dollars of damage done to the Qatar LNG facility.","offset":2126,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: There's—there's still durable damage as well. When you put that all together, like do you—what do you see the probability of markets just trying to look past this whole thing and and move on? Or how much of it is like, \"Okay, we've done too much damage, we need to discount this further.\"","offset":2140,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, I never try to denigrate Mr. Market because Mr. Market is probably smarter than all of us are. At least to some—at least at some level. That said, you know, markets can also be overly optimistic even as things are starting to break.","offset":2155,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Like think about how long it took for markets to appreciate the risk of the Russia-Ukraine war, or to appreciate what was happening in 2007, 2008. It's not like markets are always the leading indicator, and sometimes they lag considerably in terms with that.","offset":2173,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I also think you have to think in terms—you know—this is—I was relatively optimistic about the US economy going forward. And I was optimistic for precisely some of the reasons that we already talked about. Like multipolarity and deglobalization means that within these regional spheres of influence that are powered by these regional potential regional hegemons, you're going to get more investment and more capex and government support of technology and also some of these physical parts of the economy.","offset":2189,"duration":27},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So I think even with, as we're talking about, the long-term ramifications of the disruption in the Middle East, everybody's going to be worse for it. Like nobody is walking out of this conflict better for there having been a disruption.","offset":2216,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But at a relative level, some countries will have done better than others. The United States is a country that is poised to do better than most others in the world. It's far away from geopolitical zones of conflict. It has cheap and secure access to energy and to food. It is still in many ways at the commanding heights of technological innovation.","offset":2229,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: There's a lot going for the United States. And that's one of the reasons why it's so baffling that the United States did this. Like if President Trump had just kept doing what he was doing, if Cuba had been next rather than Iran, you know, we might have been talking about a very different economy going into the midterms.","offset":2246,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: China is a country that I think is going to do relatively well. And I know that some people will now like say, \"Oh, he's a CCP shill\" or whatever, and don't worry, I'm—I'm still waiting for my CCP payments for saying bullish things about China.","offset":2262,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But China, I think, is well—has been preparing for this for years. Who's leading the world in terms of rolling out renewable capacity? It's China. China's not doing that because it makes sense from an economic perspective to do so.","offset":2273,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: That is because the communists on high said, \"We will do this, because we watched the Americans in the Middle East for 20 and 30 years and we don't want to participate in that.\" Yes, we are still dependent on importing from the Persian Gulf, but we envision a world 10-15 years from now where we've got nuclear and solar and wind and everything else and that we become a center of green, you know, energy technology.","offset":2285,"duration":20},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: A, because that's nice, but B, because this is an existential issue for us. We don't want to have our energy blocked because of something that's happening in the Strait of Hormuz.","offset":2305,"duration":8},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Then you've got countries like—I mean—Saudi Arabia used to be on this list. I don't know that it still can be. But say a country like Chile, which is far away from geopolitical zones of conflict, which can have incredibly low cost of energy because of the solar, wind, geothermal potential that lies there.","offset":2313,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And so that's going to be an ideal case for you to do things with data centers or internet of things or automation or robotics and things like that. So I think you will find pockets of opportunity throughout the world, and it's about, you know, putting perspective on which places are going to do relatively better than others even despite this disruption.","offset":2326,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The one that is most out there is—is Europe. And I—I remain pretty optimistic about Europe's future. I think Europe gets left for dead too often and Europe's obvious flaws overshadow its strengths, which is: It's still an incredibly rich and wealthy place. It's a place that thinks it's geopolitically relevant that has lots of technological advantages that it can deploy.","offset":2347,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: If you're in Central or Eastern Europe and you've bet your energy future on first Russia and then on cheap energy supply coming out of the Middle East, okay, you're going to be in for some tough years. But that's not the story of France, that's not the story of Spain, that's not the story of some of these other countries.","offset":2369,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And they exist not—I mean, I wish it was a confederation, it would make it easier—but they exist in this European Union. And so those countries are going to have to look at each other and say, \"We have to stop letting Hungary hijack our priorities going forward and make some pretty serious decisions about where we're—what we're going to do to stay relevant.\"","offset":2383,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I think the EU will do that. You can make a very compelling case that they won't and that I'm just whistling into the wind here. But that I think is a block that could use the—the impetus of this crisis to do things that people today maybe aren't appreciating as possible. Like those are places that I'm going to be interested in going forward.","offset":2399,"duration":19}],"startTime":2095},{"title":"China's Grand Strategy and Pragmatic Diplomacy","summary":"Jacob analyzes China's response to US sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, noting that these moves hurt US allies more than China. He dismisses fears of an imminent invasion of Taiwan, arguing China prefers economic isolation tactics and diplomatic pragmatism.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Interesting. Okay, I want to double-click on the China thing a little bit because there's two things that are interesting to me that I've been noticing. One of them is just how quiet they've been throughout this whole crisis. Um, really haven't been that verbose or explicit about the whole thing.","offset":2418,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: And the other one too is if you rewind pre-Iran strikes when the Venezuela thing was happening, there was this whole emergence of the Donroe Doctrines, spheres of influence and a lot of speculation that it's like we're, you know, aligning the chess pieces to go after the—the big dog that is China.","offset":2432,"duration":17},{"text":"Host: Um, and you know we want to cut off all their oil supply. So we're cutting Venezuela and now we're going to Iran and now we're going to cut off the Strait of Hormuz and all that oil going to China. How are you thinking about those two dynamics?","offset":2449,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Well, let's take the last one first. We hurt over Japan, South Korea, India way more than we did China. Remember, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, all he did was turn Russia from a great power into a Chinese gas station.","offset":2459,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So China's—I'm not saying that China's energy secure, but they have more reserves, more renewable capacity online and a relationship with Russia. That is not something that your Japans and South Koreas and Indias can say.","offset":2474,"duration":19},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So in that sense, okay, if you're trying to hurt China with that 5D chess, you actually hurt your allies much more. Um, if you think I'm being too hysterical about that, think about what's happened in the Philippines over the past couple of weeks.","offset":2493,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The Philippines was one of the first countries in Asia to declare an energy emergency because of what's happening in the Hormuz—in the Strait of Hormuz. A couple days after that, the Marcos Jr. government announced that they were restarting talks with China about joint exploration in the West Philippine Sea and the South China Sea for offshore energy deposits.","offset":2505,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: That's wild. The Philippines is a US defense treaty ally. We spent years worrying about the Duterte administration getting friendlier with China and doing exactly this. It took just a couple of weeks and this war of choice in Iran for the Philippines to start looking at China and saying, \"Huh, maybe we should have a more pragmatic relationship with China. Maybe this is a country that we can do business with even in the South China Sea, even around Taiwan.\"","offset":2521,"duration":25},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So you've—you've hurt the allies more than you've hurt China there. And I think China has more reserves than folks expected. Also as for the Taiwan issue, man, can we just put it to bed finally?","offset":2546,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Because if China's not going to invade Taiwan now, with the United States bogged down in the Middle East and using all the Tomahawk missiles and everything else like that, okay, I'm waiting. Are they going to go for it? Is now the time?","offset":2558,"duration":-1069},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: No, now's not the time, because they're not thinking about it that way. They're thinking about Taiwan the way they thought about Hong Kong in the 70s and 80s. They want to isolate it economically, they want to isolate it politically.","offset":1489,"duration":1091},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: They want to get to the point where nobody cares enough about Taiwan so that when they announce that they are taking it, nobody puts up a fight to stop them, which is exactly what happened with Hong Kong.","offset":2580,"duration":9},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The UK went back to renew the lease, Margaret Thatcher—that great British nationalist herself—Deng Xiaoping said, \"Cool, we'll cut off the energy and the infrastructure and the water and we'll blockade it if that's what you want to do. Is that what you want?\"","offset":2589,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And Thatcher said, \"I think I'll go to the Falklands to wave the British flag around. Like you can have it.\" And then we had, you know, one country, two systems, blah, blah, blah. That is the move that China's playing for when it comes to Taiwan.","offset":2604,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I don't think there's any universe in which China was going to invade Taiwan. The most interesting thing I think that's gone unreported in all this, and obviously lots of things have to go unreported because the war is that important. It's crowding out a lot of things.","offset":2614,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But before the war started, you had a huge diplomatic dust-up between Japan and China. The Takeichi government really pushing China's buttons on Taiwan and some of these things.","offset":2626,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And Japan has been deploying long-range missiles and military capacity to places that China doesn't like. And so China has announced, \"Oh, okay. Well now for the next 40 days, we're going to be controlling airspace in areas of the East China Sea as we do some things that we're not going to tell you about.\"","offset":2636,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So some interesting friction back and forth there between China and Japan. So there are things to watch for. I'm not saying that China is some benevolent power that isn't scheming here, but they are scheming to take Taiwan by not firing a shot.","offset":2651,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And ironically, everything the United States is doing is helping that future come into being. But I think China's watching, you know, Russia's failed attempt to take Ukraine, the US's failed attempt at least thus far to, you know, change the regime in Iran and saying, \"Okay, well why would we try to do something that's orders of magnitude harder, which is an amphibious invasion of a hardened island that, you know, we're not going to be able to take without destroying the things that make it valuable in the first place.\" Like I just don't think China thinks that—thinks strategically that way. I think they're thinking longer term.","offset":2663,"duration":33},{"text":"Host: Yeah, I mean, yeah, seems like the easy narrative is that China's always just thinking longer term. But I—but I am curious...","offset":2696,"duration":4},{"text":"Host: What about, like, the next couple years? Like right now, you know, is their main priority just, you know, what's the quote again? Of, you know, \"don't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.\" Are they just kind of sitting by the sidelines and just watching this all happen? And they're like, \"Well, you know, eventually this is just going to make... it's probably going to make it easier for us in one form or another, not sure how, but I'm just going to wait for the dust to settle.\" What do you think?","offset":2700,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob: There's a couple ways I would answer that question. The first is, even though China really is only communist in name and form, like China's economic policies are not communist, they're sort of a weird state capitalism, like authoritarianism plus Ronald Reagan supply-side reforms in a weird bastardization together, but the form of Chinese politics is still very Marxist and very communist.","offset":2722,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob: And if you've been raised as a Marxist, um, then you look at the United States and say, \"Oh, this is late-stage capitalism. This is the late-stage capitalist hegemon basically destroying itself.\" So to your point, why would we want to get in the way of that? I think Xi Jinping also realized, um, towards the end of the 2010s and into the early 2020s that he made a mistake.","offset":2744,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob: He thought China was stronger maybe than it was. You had the wolf warrior diplomacy happening all over the place and China starting to, uh, bare its teeth a little bit. Um, and I think he was able to walk that back and see that China wasn't quite ready for that. That China needed to be more accommodating, that it needed to be a pragmatic partner, and that there was actually an opportunity in US political volatility and instability to be that.","offset":2768,"duration":25},{"text":"Jacob: And it's been very successful over the past couple of years. Uh, remember the biggest geopolitical story of this year before the war, um, was not Venezuela, it was not Greenland, it was Mark Carney going to Davos and saying, \"I'm taking the sign out of the window. I think China's a more reliable partner right now than the United States is. And we have to think about Canadian national self-interest in that context.\"","offset":2793,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob: That's a huge diplomatic win for China, that it has been able to seem more stable and more accommodating in a global international political system to a country like Canada than the United States. I think that's a very important signal. So, China's not without mistakes, and it's a huge and arguably sclerotic bureaucratic authoritarian system, so it can and will make more mistakes.","offset":2815,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob: But I think you've definitely seen a shift in Chinese policy, uh, from the wolf warriors at the end of the 2010s to right now, which is to your point, hey, how can we work with some of these other countries? How can we figure out a way, um, to create these economic relationships with them that are not tied to political ideology, that are not tied to overt asks, that don't involve us raising tariffs or threatening to do things against countries who don't do the things that we want? I think that's working for them, and I think that's what they'll continue to do here going forward.","offset":2839,"duration":30}],"startTime":2418},{"title":"Long-Term Optimism and the Energy Transition","summary":"Concluding on an optimistic note, Jacob compares the current era to the 1890s, a period of massive technological and energy transformation. He advises macro investors to focus on AI, automation, and the shift toward deflationary energy sources.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Awesome. Um, alright, we'll just kind of conclude here with just your final parting words or thoughts or recommendations for, for those of us like myself who are, you know, mostly focused on, on macro trading and we are, we are self-admitted tourists within this space and just trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Any final words on how to navigate this whole thing?","offset":2869,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob: The, the last thing I would just say, and I know it's, I know it probably sounds silly to say this, like, 47 minutes into our conversation, um, but I'm still very optimistic about the global economy over the next five to ten years. I think a lot of the dynamics that we're talking about, they will be bad for some people, they will be great for others. They will be bad for some industries, they will be transformative for others.","offset":2891,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob: I think there's a lot of comparison out there, uh, between our current time and the 1930s, uh, for folks that are thinking, \"Oh my god, like, we're on the cusp of another World War.\" I don't think that at all. I, I think the right frame of reference, and it's not a perfect historical analogy, but is the 1890s because you had rising and falling great powers. You had, uh, a generational shift in energy from coal to oil.","offset":2915,"duration":26},{"text":"Jacob: Um, you had technological innovation, you had the rollout of electricity over a 20 to 30 year time horizon, which changed everything. You had the advent of modern fertilizers, which for the first time disconnected population growth from just how much you could grow in your own regional market. Um, it was an absolutely transformative time. Now, at the end of that period, yes, there was a World War because some countries got powerful enough that they thought that they could dominate the world, or there were these weird alliance structures that forced things into a, a structure.","offset":2941,"duration":30},{"text":"Jacob: And by the way, that was a war where nobody thought that war was going to last for four years, everybody thought it was going to be a short conflict, and then once they were in it, they all had to triple, quadruple down. Um, sound familiar to you? Anyway. My point is just that I think we're on the cusp of the 1890s. So, I have to keep in touch with everything that's going on in the headlines on a daily basis.","offset":2971,"duration":23},{"text":"Jacob: I find it truly annoying because the real stuff is happening in technological innovation. What is AI doing? How is it transforming our lives? How is it transforming productivity? What is next with robotics? What is next with automation? What is next with Internet of Things? Changing everything. I want to spend all of my brain power doing that, not on parsing IRGC propaganda or White House propaganda.","offset":2994,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob: The energy transition is real, and it's not going to be like the switch from coal to oil. That's a lay-up, like, I wish I had been, you know, investing in the 1890s and I could have been like, \"Yes, buy shares of Standard Oil and then we will go to golf and not touch them for another 60 years,\" like, probably would have been the best trade ever, right? But we're not going from oil to something else, we're going from oil to everything else.","offset":3018,"duration":23},{"text":"Jacob: So does that mean that you invest in the energy technologies themselves? Does that mean you invest in the picks and shovels that build the energy themselves? Is this a story about electrification and the grid and everything that it has to do to support this? Is it all the above? Is it really just you want the companies that are going to benefit from, and it's hard to think about this in 2026, but cheaper energy?","offset":3041,"duration":20},{"text":"Jacob: Because by 2030, 2035, probably energy is deflationary, no matter what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz. That's something I want to spend my time talking about. Um, so, you know, you can get wrapped up in everything that's happening in headlines and you can't ignore it because if you ignore it, you ignore potential challenges to those theses or data points that you really need in terms to update that.","offset":3061,"duration":23},{"text":"Jacob: But I, I am sticking to my guns and I would encourage your listeners to stick to their guns. Develop a macro viewpoint, uh, create scenarios for that, and then start to see is this true or is there or is this not true? Even with all the doom and gloom that I've talked about here, I'm optimistic. I'm looking for opportunities to deploy capital in technological innovation, in the energy revolution, in electrification, uh, and in the recession of US global power into a multipolar world and the markets that are best-posed to benefit from that. That's what I do when I'm not forced to talk about whatever strange things are happening in the Middle East.","offset":3084,"duration":41},{"text":"Host: Boom. Very well said. I, yeah, could not agree more with that. Um, yeah, I feel like the thing I, I keep trying to remind myself, I don't know if you agree with this or not, is that look, despite everything going on, all these shortages, like, don't short human ingenuity and, you know, all shortages are followed by gluts is something that I've heard talked about. I don't know if you agree with that or not, but it just feels like interesting framing to at least try to anchor yourself to what's going to happen on the 5 to 10 year horizon here.","offset":3125,"duration":27},{"text":"Jacob: Yeah, I mean, I, I always... uh, I like Jimmy Carr, the, the comedian, and he had some... somebody asked him some question about optimism in the current world, and he had this great... he had this great answer. He was like, \"You know, 100 years ago, nobody really knew what a hot shower was. Like, just, like, you get hot showers all... like, we live in a world, like, I can go to my TV right now and stream anything I want in the entire world, and I can order some, you know, chicken wings on my phone to my house so I can eat them while I'm watching whatever I want on my TV.\"","offset":3152,"duration":25},{"text":"Jacob: I was talking to Claude earlier about, like, taking everything I've written for the last 20 years and putting it into a database, it's like, doing that right now. Um, I mean, life is, like, really incredible. I feel like we're, we're missing... that we're uh, actually in the good times right now.","offset":3177,"duration":17}],"startTime":2869},{"title":"Conclusion and Guest Contact Information","summary":"The host and Jacob wrap up the conversation and share final thoughts. Jacob provides his website and contact information for listeners interested in following his geopolitical research.","entries":[{"text":"Host: Yeah. Couldn't agree more. Awesome, Jacob. Well, uh, where can folks go if they want to see more of your work and what you got going on?","offset":3194,"duration":6},{"text":"Jacob: Pretty simple. Just go to jacobshapiro.com or you can email me at jacob@jacobshapiro.com. There's the podcast, research, speaking, um, and maybe doing some interesting things, uh, sort of in-between things when it comes to investment, but but cooking on some things there. So, follow me there and and you'll see where the journey goes.","offset":3200,"duration":19},{"text":"Host: Awesome. Love it. Well, thanks for joining on here and giving us the geopolitical update. Appreciate it.","offset":3219,"duration":5},{"text":"Jacob: It's my pleasure, and we'll have to get, uh, cousin Marko on either individually or maybe we'll, uh, we'll force ourselves, the both of you, uh, on you. I'm not sure your hair will be able to handle...","offset":3224,"duration":9},{"text":"Host: That would be... that would be unreal. I, I would love that. Yeah. My hair will probably be on fire afterwards, but I'll just be a vessel for it and just enjoy the ride. But that would be awesome.","offset":3233,"duration":9},{"text":"Jacob: Yeah. Sounds good. Cheers.","offset":3242,"duration":2},{"text":"Host: Thank you.","offset":3244,"duration":15}],"startTime":3194}],"entries":[{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: It literally did not come into my imagination that this would be a longer war, that this would be a war for longer than three to four weeks, because the asymmetry of the advantages here go in Iran's favor. But all that really matters right now is how many ships are going in and out of the strait.","offset":0,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Physical shortages are starting to show up in East Asian economies. And if we keep going on this path, if we are still here in a month talking about this, we'll be talking about those shortages moving from East Asia to Europe, even to the Western Hemisphere.","offset":13,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: There's a scenario here where maybe President Trump talks tomorrow or in the next week or two, and yet the disruptions that we're talking about are only just beginning because the global supply chain disruptions will move from a conversation about the Strait of Hormuz to what Ukraine is doing to Russia.","offset":25,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So it's an acceleration of deglobalization, it's an acceleration of multipolarity. You are looking for those places in the world that are on a relative basis will perform better when there is an energy choke point disruption.","offset":43,"duration":8},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Certainty and stability will not be coming from Washington or will not be guaranteed by Washington going forward. It's the end of an era. But it seems to me that the best case scenario coming out of all this is...","offset":51,"duration":12},{"text":"Host: Nothing said on Forward Guidance is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by NOM on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks.","offset":63,"duration":7},{"text":"Host: Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. As always, investments and blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Do your own research.","offset":70,"duration":26},{"text":"Host: All right everybody, welcome back to another episode of Forward Guidance. And joining me this week is Jacob Shapiro, independent geopolitical analyst, as well as the host of the Jacob Shapiro podcast and Geopolitical Cousins, which is by far my favorite geopolitical podcast.","offset":96,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: I do not miss an episode. You and Marco are just awesome. Reminds me a lot of what I do on the Roundup every week with the other co-hosts Quinn and Tyler, where we just chop it up, banter, and try to navigate the endless headlines. So super excited to have you on.","offset":106,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: You know, it's always funny when—it would be interesting to look at the correlation of when geopolitical experts come on podcasts versus like the degree of, I don't know, shit hitting the fan in the world. I'm sure it's just—I'm sure you've looked at it before, but it's always interesting. But yeah, excited to have you on the show, Jacob.","offset":122,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Thanks for having me. I don't know that I can promise much guidance, but it can certainly be forward. And yeah, I find that the pace of—I mean, obviously the last month has been nuts, but really ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, it feels like it has not let up in terms of being asked to come on and speak to either audiences or to do interviews. Like that was, that was definitely the moment where the world woke up and said, \"Geopolitics is back.\"","offset":138,"duration":26},{"text":"Host: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Geopolitics is back. And back more than ever right now over the last month. So obviously the topic du jour is Iran and everything going on there and the Strait of Hormuz.","offset":164,"duration":12},{"text":"Host: Would love for for those that just have not been as tuned into how you've been thinking about this crisis and the development of it. If you could just walk through your initial framework going into the initial strikes day in February, and then just how the sequence of events have evolved and how your framework has evolved up to basically now the first week of April.","offset":176,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, I'll try to make this succinct, and if I'm failing, I hope you will, you know, get the hook in here and get me off or tell me to be quiet. And I'll also just give you by way of background, I'm a global analyst now, and I'm especially in the last couple of years have been directly tying geopolitical analysis to active investing and investment positions and things like that.","offset":190,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But I cut my teeth as a Middle East analyst. My academic training is in the Middle East, my languages expertise is all in the Middle East. And it's always been funny to me that as a geopolitical analyst, in some sense the Middle East—I think I certainly analyze it and understand it well.","offset":212,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: From a predictive standpoint, it's—by far my worst region. And I think there's something to be said for knowing too much about a thing. It puts you too close to the action, you're almost too smart for your own good. You can't get that same degree of global macro when you're too attached to it.","offset":228,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Which is my way of excusing myself for thinking I didn't think that the United States was going to undertake this war. I didn't think that because I thought they knew that the implications would be, well, I didn't even think catastrophic. I thought that they knew that it would be a short-term war and that they probably wouldn't be able to achieve their objectives.","offset":246,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: It literally did not come into my imagination that this would be a longer war, that this would be a war for longer than three to four weeks, because the asymmetry of the advantages here go in Iran's favor.","offset":259,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: For the first two or three weeks, the United States and Israel together lit up Iran, and it was all about firepower, epic fury. I'm old enough to remember when we did this in the second Gulf War. That was the period of the war that was always going to be very successful and very impressive for the United States military.","offset":271,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But two to three weeks in, then Iran's asymmetric advantages start to assert themselves. Their first and most important advantage is the Strait of Hormuz, is geography. And unless the United States has invented a weapon that separates Iran from control of the Strait of Hormuz, you can have all the shiny weapons you want and blow up all the power plants you want.","offset":287,"duration":20},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: You're going to be fighting with a power that can upend the global economy by saying no ship shall go through the strait, which is exactly kind of what we're living through right this moment.","offset":307,"duration":9},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And then the second asymmetric advantage, and this is something we already saw with Russia and Ukraine, we saw it with the Houthis being able to resist the United States and block shipping through the Red Sea. We've seen it in all kinds of conflicts in recent years.","offset":316,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The United States may have very fancy interceptors and F-35s and all sorts of things that cost all amounts of money to develop. The Iranians have relatively, by comparison, unsophisticated rockets and missiles and drones and they cost far less.","offset":327,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And they can deploy much higher numbers of these things versus very fancy and expensive US military hardware where you get to the point where they're now beginning to see more bang for their buck or their rial or their yuan or Bitcoin, whatever you want to throw in there.","offset":343,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: They're getting more bang for their buck because we've exhausted a lot of those higher-end things and they can just keep throwing out the cheap stuff. And that means that even as you decimate their navy and their air force and their launchers, as long as they've got a certain capacity left and people willing to fire them, they're going to keep firing.","offset":358,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And you're seeing that happen in real time right now. So that's a big intro by way of saying that I didn't think this was going to happen because I thought the United States had learned from previous mistakes.","offset":374,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I also took President Trump—my bad—at his word that this was a guy who campaigned on not going into wars in the Middle East and wasting trillions of dollars on American lives on fools' errands in the Middle East. And he got me, the bait and switch is on.","offset":384,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it's, nope, it's war in the Middle East and this is absolutely critical. And by the way, the last thing I'd just say is, you know, second Iraq war at least you had the excuse of US energy insecurity being the geopolitical reasoning behind it.","offset":396,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: There's no reason for the United States to be messing around the Strait of Hormuz. Since the shale revolution, the United States is a net exporter of crude, it's been keeping the lights on in Europe by exporting LNG. Yes, there are still global economic exposures based on the things that are blocked out of the Strait of Hormuz, but there's no compelling reason to be obsessed with Persian Gulf oil if you're the United States, which took another geopolitical reason off the board to engage in this conflict.","offset":411,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But yet, it's April 6th, the war's been going on for, what, five, six weeks now, and we're 24 hours from a Trump taco or from Trump obliterating the country or something in between. So there we are.","offset":428,"duration":15},{"text":"Host: There we are. Okay, that's a great foundation. I want to move in and isolate towards understanding what are the actual important things to look at for economic slash market consequences.","offset":443,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: So you mentioned how you are very focused on understanding how to track these geopolitical events and in moving them towards some sort of tangible investment frameworks or macro analysis. Obviously this is a macro podcast, so the number one question I think that people listening to this are trying to figure out is: Okay, there's a million headlines a day right now, some of them move markets, some of them don't. There's a lot of stuff moving in a lot of different parts here. How do you isolate into the things that are actually meaningful towards global macroeconomics and markets?","offset":454,"duration":31},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, I want to answer that question in two ways. The first is at a—is at a macro time horizon. And when I say macro time horizon, I mean over a three to five year time horizon. So I did not think the United States was going to invade Iran, but from a positional perspective, I'm doing okay because I was long energy, I was long fertilizer, I was long food.","offset":485,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Like all of the things that are being affected by this, I was long for other reasons entirely, which tells you that this is exacerbating those things. It's making things move more quickly than I expected. But if anything, it's an accelerant, it's not a disruptor in that sense.","offset":506,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: We were already moving towards deglobalization. We were already moving towards multipolarity of supply chains. We were already seeing the securitization of things like food and semiconductors and feedstocks.","offset":519,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: All these things becoming part of the conversation about national security and countries that can protect those supply chains or make themselves self-sufficient in them, you were seeing those moves anyway.","offset":532,"duration":7},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And so I think over a three to five year time horizon, all that's happened is an acceleration of those trends that we were already watching. So it's an acceleration of deglobalization, it's an acceleration of multipolarity. You are looking for those places in the world that are on a relative basis will perform better when there is an energy choke point disruption in the Middle East, or who are going to perform better when there is—when there are rising food prices.","offset":539,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And conversely, you're also looking for those markets and countries that are not going to perform well. The countries that are able to assure cheap supply and secure supply of energy, cheap and secure supply of food, and are able to invest in the cutting edge of technology. Those are your countries that are going to be net winners over a three to five year time horizon. We could talk about those countries, those markets, those companies, verticals if you want.","offset":561,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Then there's our shorter term time horizon, which is: There's a lot of noise in the media and it's being generated by the White House, it's being generated by the IRGC, it's being generated by governments all over the place.","offset":582,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But all that really matters is how many ships are going in and out of the strait. And a week ago it was basically zero. It has ticked up a little bit in the last two to three days. Whether that is because the Iranians have this tolling system active and they are accepting payment for that, or whether it's ships that are running through because they think the Iranians can't cash the threats that they're making.","offset":593,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: There's probably some combination of both there. You are seeing an uptick in the ships that are going through the Strait of Hormuz. Now, we are still at something like 20% of what is normal. So don't think for a second that this is normalized.","offset":611,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And don't think for a second, by the way, that we have up-to-date information on the damage that has already been done to infrastructure in the region. Let's say the war stopped in an hour. The first thing I want to know is: Okay, how damaged are the LNG facilities in Qatar? How damaged are the gas fields in Iran and some of these other places?","offset":624,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: How long will it take to fix these things? Are we talking about turbines that have to be reordered, or are we talking about fixes that can happen on a time span of months? So there just is a lot of uncertainty that we're dealing with there. And I think the market is communicating that uncertainty to you in a bit.","offset":641,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Markets have been sanguine and almost delusional from my perspective. The disconnect between markets and the physical economies has never been more obvious, because the physical economy, especially in places that were over—overdependent on the region for a lot of these things.","offset":655,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The physical economies are starting to show the cracks. I mean, physical shortages are starting to show up in East Asian economies. And if we keep going on this path, if we are still here in a month talking about this, we'll be talking about those shortages moving from East Asia to Europe, even to the Western Hemisphere for all of the talk about US energy self-sufficiency as well.","offset":669,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So at the long-term perspective, you have to have that macro model about where the world is moving. Mine is multipolarity. There are others out there. And then for the short term, it's really just are ships going in and out of the strait. Period. And those are the things that I'm trying to keep my mind on at the same time.","offset":691,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: Yeah, 100%. I totally agree that the main vector to look at is counting ships. And it's an interesting one when I look at how the market has been digesting that idea over the last few weeks.","offset":707,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: As it feels like over the last three weeks or so there is an acceptance that there was almost no flow through the strait. And then over the past few days, I've started to see two vectors start to accelerate.","offset":718,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: One of those vectors being this idea of a dark fleet that is turning off their AIS and running the strait, whether they just had some sort of, you know, under the table agreement with Iran to let them go through. Or there's the more formal pact of what's going on with, say, you know, what you would assume are US allies, like France, have struck a deal with Iran to be able to start to move some of their oil through.","offset":729,"duration":20},{"text":"Host: So I'm curious: How do you think about those two vectors and how do you discount the validity or just quantify how to measure those?","offset":749,"duration":9},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: It's really difficult and I'm not brave enough to go to the strait myself and test some of these things against each other. But you have reputable sources that are saying that at least some ships are paying a toll, and that they're paying the toll in yuan to get through.","offset":758,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that the IRGC has a system for doing this, that they have country rankings based on how close they are to the United States or how Iran views their relationships with that country, and that affects the fee that you have to pay. So there are, you know, open-source reports from reputable sources that say that is happening.","offset":773,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Now, you have to take everything with a grain of salt here because it's the fog of war, but that's happening. Then you also, to your point, have reports about, you know, ships that are just running—are making a run for it. And they're getting through. Is that a testament to their bravery?","offset":789,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Is that because to your point they have a tacit understanding that the IRGC is not going to go after them at this point in time? Maybe they can't. Maybe they're focused on other things. Okay, like all open questions here.","offset":801,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But yeah, I don't have a solid answer for you. Like we have to be comfortable I think with the uncertainty. But it seems to me that the best case scenario coming out of all this is some type of tolling structure, whether it's wholly Iran or whether it's some kind of Iran-GCC combo toll, that returns certainty to transiting the Strait of Hormuz.","offset":815,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it's crazy to me because that means the best case scenario we're talking about is: You're no longer thinking that the United States Navy is there to guarantee global shipping lanes and maritime choke points.","offset":836,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: You want there to be some kind of localized tolling facility, even if it's with the ayatollahs of Iran, a group of not particularly nice people. Like you'd rather know, \"Okay, this is what I pay, this is what I do, and I get through the Strait of Hormuz.\" Like certainty and stability is what's going to be the best case scenario coming out of this.","offset":848,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that certainty and stability will not be coming from Washington or will not be guaranteed by Washington going forward. And for some countries I guess that'll be good, but for most of the world and for the United States, which has profited off of US-led and protected globalization, it's the end of an era in some sense.","offset":863,"duration":18},{"text":"Host: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's a great point and just to zoom out into this secular trend that you mentioned of deglobalization and multipolarity is: Okay, you have this basis that the Strait of Hormuz has had this degree of security guarantees from the overall American apparatus for decades now.","offset":881,"duration":19},{"text":"Host: And that apparatus and those security guarantees are on the margin moving away. And then we have to figure out and discount: Okay, how much is it going to move towards this new world where Iran is the one or maybe in some sort of agreement with Oman, they're the ones running the toll booth now?","offset":900,"duration":13},{"text":"Host: And pairing that with who are actually dependent on the strait, which is, i.e., you know, Europe and they have to decide who do they align with, and then also East Asian markets and who they have to decide who to align with.","offset":913,"duration":13},{"text":"Host: And I'm curious about how you're thinking about how all these different countries net out. Because again, there's—you know, there's been interesting stuff what's been going on with the UN Security Council this week where you had them trying to vote about whether to intervene with outright force or not.","offset":926,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: And you saw actually, you know, France aligning with China and Russia for example. So these traditional lines of, you know, the West versus the East or however you want to define it just don't seem as consistent anymore. So I'm just curious: How do you see this whole framing net out over the next few years? It just seems completely convoluted.","offset":942,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, well first things first, like who cares what the United Nations says. I mean, it's like the Dave Chappelle Black Bush sketch, like \"Sanction me! Sanction me with your army! Oh, you don't have an army! Okay, cool.\" So I don't really care what the UN says.","offset":959,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: No, I think here we also have to widen the aperture a little bit because the Russia-Ukraine war is also ongoing. And one of the things that has made me more optimistic in a multipolar world is that I expected you would get these types of small regional conflicts, but that they would be relatively self-contained.","offset":972,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So the Russia-Ukraine war, despite—you know—myriad articles written about the beginning of World War III, it's a Russia-Ukraine war. It's a war between those two actors. Yes, some countries are supporting the other side with weapons, but it's Russian soldiers, Ukrainian soldiers, and those poor North Koreans that the Russians imported.","offset":989,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: One of the things that's different about this conflict is you're starting to see the bleed over. And this is something I don't think markets have really quite gotten through their head. Because Ukraine is watching everything that's happening in the Strait of Hormuz, and I imagine that Zelenskyy—you know—I'm imagining here, I don't—I don't know this for sure.","offset":1005,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But I imagine Zelenskyy's watching the situation and watching Iran's asymmetric—asymmetric advantage work and thinking to himself, \"Oh, if I can affect the global price of oil or petrochemical supply chains or things like that, people will listen to me even if I'm being blown up by the United States and Israel, even though my air force is gone and everything else like that.\"","offset":1019,"duration":19},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: \"Cool. So instead of hitting Russian energy infrastructure that makes life harder for the everyday Russian citizen,\" which is what Ukraine has been doing for the past 12 months, trying to drive up the price of gasoline for the average Russian consumer, hitting that infrastructure.","offset":1038,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: \"I'm going to go after Russian oil export infrastructure. I'm going to go after Russian petrochemical export infrastructure because then maybe people will start listening to what I want.\"","offset":1051,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: \"I also don't want Vladimir Putin to profit from higher oil prices. I don't want the Europeans to hang me out to dry by having to go back to Moscow and saying, 'We really don't like you, but we kind of need your oil and natural gas and fertilizers and everything else again. So let's let bygones be bygones and we'll try and muzzle the Ukrainians and threaten support and things like that.'\"","offset":1062,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: All of which is to say this now goes from Russia—excuse me—Israel-US versus Iran with some GCC states game theory into also Russia versus Ukraine and the powers that are on either side of that.","offset":1079,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it just starts to get unwieldy when you think about all the different circumstances that are there. So yeah, I mean, there is a—there is a scenario here where maybe President Trump talks tomorrow or in the next week or two, and yet the disruptions that we're talking about are only just beginning because the global supply chain disruptions will move from a conversation about the Strait of Hormuz to what Ukraine is doing to Russia and what that means in general.","offset":1094,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And then just layer on top of that—I'm not usually a doomer here, but it's very hard not to at least engage in the doomer scenarios to be ready for them. I mean, let's say all that's happening and then it's hurricane season in the United States, and what if a hurricane, you know, hits the Gulf and some capacity of US exports goes offline?","offset":1118,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Like we don't even have to do anything nefarious about cyberattacks or electromagnetic pulses or all the crazy things that the doomers want to do. Let's just say it's a weather formation and a storm knocks off some percentage of US exports.","offset":1136,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Now you're dealing with a global economy where things are already very lean, everybody's already on edge, and that one sort of bastion of supply that is far away from the geopolitical conflict gets hit. Okay, and now we're off to the races.","offset":1147,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So just every single one of these things increases the brittleness of global supply chains. And that's a story that we've—you know—I've also been tracking for quite some time as well. So that's how I would think about widening the aperture and thinking about international interest. Certainly don't think about what the UN has to say. They have no power here.","offset":1161,"duration":17},{"text":"Host: That's super helpful. Okay, yeah, I do want to ratchet down one level towards those specific supply chains and understand and map out.","offset":1178,"duration":8},{"text":"Host: You know, I feel like just as a general tourist to this space and trying to read the news articles and understand what's going on, a lot of headlines are really focused on the price of oil and less so on some of these more downstream impacts, whether it's the fertilizer market or helium and the LNG space and things like that.","offset":1186,"duration":17},{"text":"Host: So I'm just curious if you could just map out for us when you look at these different lists of supply chain issues, which ones do you feel like are rightly an issue? Which ones do you feel like are not being paid enough attention to? And yeah, like which ones are you most concerned about here?","offset":1203,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, um, I mean, it's impossible to map them all out without putting listeners to sleep. But let's sort of talk about some of the big categories. The big ones. Because even in a crisis, like supply chains are for nerds. Like this is—you don't go into college being like, \"I'm going to be an expert on supply chains.\"","offset":1220,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Oil, look, oil's important. In some ways, it's the one that I'm least worried about, not least because you have countries with strategic reserves. Four to five million barrels per day are crossing that pipeline and getting out through Yanbu, at least for now.","offset":1237,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: If the Houthis get involved and if the Red Sea is shut, okay, like we can—we can start sounding the alarm there. I certainly think we'll see elevated oil prices through the end of the year. But in some sense, like that's the one that maybe I'm least worried about.","offset":1251,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: LNG is a—is different because you're not piping LNG to Yanbu across—across the desert. And Europe really—like Europe was depending on access to all the LNG capacity coming online out of this.","offset":1263,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: That's how they were going to balance the lack of supply that was coming from Russia. And that doesn't mean that the Europeans are going to go cold in the winter. What it means is they're going to pay higher spot prices for these things, even if it's from China rerouting some of what they're getting over there.","offset":1279,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that means your emerging markets that were betting that they were going to have access to some of this LNG are going to have to start scrambling themselves, whether that's, you know, coal or what Pakistan has done with solar in the last couple of years. They're the ones that are going to be scrambling, that are going to be hurt the worst.","offset":1292,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Fertilizer's a big deal. Fertilizer is another one of these very lean supply chains where you don't have strategic fertilizer reserves. Fertilizer's really only relevant one or two times a year based on when farmers are planting and when they need the fertilizer.","offset":1309,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And so that's when the supply chain is there for them. We already missed the window for many farmers throughout the world to apply fertilizer. So you can book in now lower yields in many parts of the world and rising food prices in those parts of the world.","offset":1321,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And we won't know the full impact of that from six to nine months till now. But just a reminder that the Arab Spring began with rising food prices in the Middle East. It was a Tunisian vegetable salesman who self-immolated that started the Arab Spring because food prices were too high and because that vegetable salesman didn't feel like they could make a living and then they got insulted by police and we were off to the races.","offset":1336,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Um, so I think that potential six to nine months down the road in emerging markets for thinking about some of that type of political disruption, that's there and that ties directly to fertilizer. And then the last major category is the petrochemical complex.","offset":1351,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that spans everything from, you know, boring things like plastic and plastics and resins to higher value input things like helium that you're talking about that are critical for semiconductor manufacturing.","offset":1365,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And, I mean, this is still a thesis that I'm building, but in some sense I'm less worried about things like helium because helium's important enough that there are strategic reserves out there. And at least the reporting I've seen and my contacts in the space seem to be—I mean, optimistic is the wrong point of view—but not freaking out.","offset":1378,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: In my Rolodex, the folks that are freaking out are those ones for those mid-to-lower tier petrochemical products that you would think are boring, like the plastic that's in everything in your life, which you're seeing doubling and tripling of prices.","offset":1394,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Or you're seeing companies that are saying, \"I just can't get it. Like it's not available for any price, or I have to go to China or I have to go to some weird place before that maybe that's going to run afoul of global sanctions in order to—in order to get it.\"","offset":1409,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that again is—these are products for which there's no strategic reserve. Nobody was sitting there being like, \"Yeah, I need a strategic plastic polymer reserve because I need to make sure that I have plastics that I can wrap the food in that I'm selling at the grocery store.\"","offset":1421,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But that's where it's going to start showing up, because those are the things where things are very lean. And by the way, like the whatever you think about globalization and free trade, we could argue till we're blue in the face: Is it good, is it bad?","offset":1433,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The thing about free trade, the thing that makes it efficient, that the bulls will say about free trade is, yeah, that's exactly how it's supposed to work. You produce what you need, when you need it, for the cheapest price possible, in the geographies that are most optimized for that production.","offset":1444,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And that's the way a lot of supply chains are. Even though the world is moving multipolar, lots of supply chains still function like it's a globalized world. So when you have this kind of crisis and this level of supply chain disruption, you're dealing with supply chains that are expecting a perfect globalized free trade world of the 1990s.","offset":1459,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And instead they're getting this version of multipolarity and regional warfare and return of great power politics of 2026. Now, those supply chains will change. Trade is like water, it will find cracks, it will figure out the way it needs to get from Point A to Point B.","offset":1474,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But just like water, water can be very destructive when it's trying to find those cracks. Levees can break, walls can crash down, you can inundate entire areas as those things try and get from Point A to Point B.","offset":1489,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And usually it's your emerging markets, your countries that have lower buffers, that don't have strategic reserves, that are already constrained from a fiscal position. Those are the countries that are going to be front and center, and then you'll get relative degrees of pain depending on where you are and what your self-sufficiency is. So that's—that's my best way of trying to very succinctly putting a bow around global supply chains and which ones are affected.","offset":1499,"duration":22},{"text":"Host: Before you place a trade, you should know who is actually moving the market. That's where Arkham comes in. Arkham is a crypto intelligence platform and exchange that lets you see real on-chain data, which wallets are buying, selling, and moving funds, and then trade directly on that information.","offset":1521,"duration":15},{"text":"Host: Arkham was built to make blockchains human readable. Instead of raw transaction data, you get clear profiles, visualizers, and custom dashboards that show what's really happening beneath the surface. Tracking wallets and fund flows is becoming just as important as technical or fundamental analysis.","offset":1536,"duration":15},{"text":"Host: On-chain intelligence is also one of the best tools traders have to protect themselves against hacks, rugs, and scams. With Arkham Exchange, you can go from insight to execution in one place: the world's first exchange powered by crypto intelligence. Check out Arkham and start trading with real on-chain insight at arkham.com.","offset":1551,"duration":18},{"text":"Host: Blockworks co-founder Michael Ippolito here. Quick break to talk about something we've just launched: Blockworks Investor Relations. As the market shifts toward institutional capital, investors want more transparency, more standardization, and a higher level of professionalism.","offset":1569,"duration":13},{"text":"Host: But the traditional IR model is slow, manual, and not built for how crypto works. If you're building on-chain, your data is already live, your business is already transparent. The challenge is turning that into a clear, credible story for investors. That's exactly what we're solving with Blockworks IR.","offset":1582,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: It's a single platform that brings together real-time analytics, branded investor portals, and hands-on advisory support so you can communicate what matters. If you're an on-chain business looking to level up your investor strategy, check out Blockworks Investor Relations at blockworks.com/investor-relations. All right, back to the episode.","offset":1598,"duration":19},{"text":"Host: Awesome, that's great. I don't think we put anybody to sleep there. That was compelling to myself anyway, so I'm sure everybody's still awake.","offset":1617,"duration":7},{"text":"Host: The big question that hand that comes from that for me is understanding the timeline that we have that we can work around this. You know, obviously you mentioned a lot of the really key strategic ones have those reserves associated with it, and then there's the more downstream ones that don't have any reserves associated with it.","offset":1624,"duration":16},{"text":"Host: So I'm just curious: How do you think about the timeline for how much working time we have? Or how much you—how much you think maybe the Trump and Israel are thinking about how much time they have for this operation before it's like, \"Oh crap, we're really doing some structural damage. Like, there is no inventory in these certain important assets and we're really screwed here.\" What does that timeline look like for you?","offset":1640,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Well, let's break those in two, because Israel doesn't care. Israel cares that this rival that has threatened to wipe it off the map—so I'm not ascribing a value judgment here—but Israel views Iran as an existential threat, and all it wants to see, if not regime change, then it will take chaos and obliteration. Like that is a net positive from Israel's point of view. It will deal with the economic catastrophe that comes in.","offset":1662,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Israel is a country that is relatively well-off. Ever since their discovery of offshore gas, it's removed one of their key vulnerabilities in terms of inputs, and they're actually in a pretty good position.","offset":1683,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: As for the United States, I mean, this really comes down to psychoanalysis on some level and who Trump is listening to and what he thinks. Because based on what I understand, I think we're already flirting with disaster.","offset":1694,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Um, you know, I think if you're looking at most of these things, if you don't have this war wrapped up in two to three weeks, you know, you're probably talking about physical shortages for many of the things that we just talked about.","offset":1707,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And when I say two-three weeks, like you have to then assume that there is an escalation in that time period or that you don't get further damage to infrastructure that makes restarting all that much harder, which is pretty hard to imagine considering the rhetoric that is going back and forth between the sides.","offset":1719,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: All of which is to say, you know, the constraints point to this being resolved two weeks ago. But President Trump has not resolved it. He's doubled down and tripled down and he's, you know, he's threatening—I mean, I forget the exact words that he used in that tweet yesterday—but I mean, just kind of insane the level of threats that he's raising against Iran.","offset":1733,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: You've got a trillion and a half dollar defense budget that's coming—I mean, he's not acting like somebody who's about to throw in the towel. Now, maybe it's the art of the deal. Maybe the art of the deal is beyond me. But there's that.","offset":1751,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But yeah, if we're here two-three weeks from now talking about the same things, and you know, we could still be talking about the war and shipping has gone back not to normal, but goes back to 60-70% and the Iranians are only striking certain types of targets that are connected to Israel and the United States.","offset":1762,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Okay, like now we're talking about some kind of resumption. But yeah, I'm worried that we're already off the cliff, and even the folks I think that are pretty sober and optimistic about this would be the first to admit, \"Yeah, if we're here on May 1st and we're still talking about this, the global economy is going to be—is going to be majorly affected.\"","offset":1778,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And as for the last thing just, it is obvious to me that President Trump and this administration is thinking that the United States is safe from this because of the shale revolution and because the United States is not dependent on importing oil and LNG from the Persian Gulf.","offset":1794,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it's just such a facile and feeble point of view. You can argue that the United States needs to Make America Great Again and nearshore or reshore all this industrial capacity back to the United States and everything else. Cool, it hasn't happened yet in the Year of Our Lord 2026, and this supply chain disruption is here right now.","offset":1809,"duration":20},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The United States is exposed to the global economy. And yes, maybe the United States has some fundamental factors that mean it can weather it on paper a little bit better, but Joe Biden learned just how hard it is to weather things on paper versus when people are at the gas pump and being like, \"Hey, it's five dollars to pump at the gas tank,\" or eggs have gone to this.","offset":1829,"duration":23},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Watching President Trump try and lecture the American public that everything's fine with the economy. I mean, he's doing the exact same thing that Biden did in 2022, which is the exact reason that we have President Trump 2.0 in the first place.","offset":1852,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: All of which is to say, US politics is way more brittle than the US strategic position. We're going into the midterms. Trump is at terribly low approval ratings, and even worse for him, he's at terribly low approval ratings on his handling of the economy.","offset":1866,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: No matter what people thought about him, he always got good ratings on, \"Oh, this guy is going to handle the economy better than Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton or any of these others.\" Those numbers are now where they were at for Joe Biden in 2022.","offset":1880,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Um, so at least from a domestic political constraint point of view, you would think that he would see the disaster that is coming in November and would start to change course. But it seems, you know, if I'm just doing psychoanalysis and reading what he's doing, it doesn't seem to me like it's art of the deal.","offset":1893,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: It seems to me like he really believes that the tariffs worked and that America is great again and that he is presiding over the greatest—you know—economic Renaissance in the history of the country. And I'm sorry, like I'll take the other side. I don't think that's true. But I think he's operating from that standpoint.","offset":1906,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: Yeah. I mean, that's the ultimate head-scratcher is that it's—I mean, yeah, you just set to pull a polymarket look for two seconds and you're going to see that they're the polling is going to go terrible for the midterms for them. And it's just such a—it's just such a head-scratcher.","offset":1920,"duration":13},{"text":"Host: I'm curious so: Yeah, what is your—what is your framework for heading into the \"quote-unquote\" negotiations happening right now between Iran and the US via Pakistan and this—this potential deadline approach of tomorrow, so Tuesday, I think at 8 o'clock or something like that Eastern, is sort of this—this do-or-die moment for getting some sort of agreement between the two parties.","offset":1933,"duration":25},{"text":"Host: And I'm just curious like: How do you view the framework to head into that negotiation and what's actually really going on there? Because there's just so much noise around it. So is it—you know—you just look at this timeline acuteness that we just unpacked? Is it something to do with: Okay, we really got to get this wrapped up in the next couple weeks or so because midterms are in November and we need to try to, you know, put out the fires that we've just self-inflicted on ourselves by then or, you know, just have enough runway? Like, how do you think about all that?","offset":1958,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I'm opting out of the reality TV show presidency. I stayed up late what was that Friday or whatever he was doing the White House press—you know—the press conference from the Oval or from the White House or whatever it was because he was going to make some announcement it was going to be ground troops.","offset":1982,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And it wasn't, it was just President Trump being President Trump. And he has a knack for creating these inflection points, these moments where everybody's talking about him and everybody's focused on this thing. I'm not buying it. Like I'm buying our ships coming out in and out of the Strait of Hormuz.","offset":1994,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Does Iran feel like it's done enough to either re-establish deterrence or is it making progress in getting reaching some kind of modus vivendi with Oman and GCC states about where this goes from here?","offset":2008,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: If you're just reading the plain objectives of both sides, I don't think Iran feels like it has caused enough pain to the global economy to re-establish deterrence, and I don't think the United States is acting like a country that is able to declare mission achieved or—you know—mission objectives achieved quite yet.","offset":2020,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So that tells me that, you know, maybe there's negotiations going on, but it doesn't look like either side is ready to bend. Maybe I'm reading that wrong. Maybe Iran actually is hurting much worse than I think, and Iran feels like it's done enough and maybe it's got, you know, back channelers from the—from the Gulf states that make them feel like they can do that.","offset":2037,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Maybe President Trump really does believe like he's achieved his objectives and he can end this particular season of the reality TV show and move on to the next episode. But yeah, I'm opting out of these \"Oh, tomorrow's the inflection point.\"","offset":2054,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Because for all we know, he'll come on tomorrow and be like, \"I've extended the deadline another two days, but Thursday is now, you know, bridge obliteration day.\" Like, okay. How many straits are coming in or—excuse me—how many ships are coming in and out of the Strait of Hormuz?","offset":2066,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: What is the price of jet fuel in Singapore? What is the difference between, you know, Asian futures and and what Brent crude is showing us: market versus physical shortages. Like that's what I'm interested ultimately. And when that stuff starts going back, you'll probably be able to see the politicians starting to change their tunes.","offset":2080,"duration":15},{"text":"Host: Hmm. To that point, obviously, yeah, there's a lot of more esoteric markets like you mentioned, like Singapore jet oil, that have gone absolutely bananas.","offset":2095,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: But then there's also other things like, you know, US equities are, you know, barely down from all-time highs. And I'm just curious about: When you net out everything that exists today and how it's—how it's been discounted?","offset":2105,"duration":10},{"text":"Host: And if we can get to this point where markets can forward-look to a point where there is this like weird new world of a gray zone around the Strait of Hormuz where there is partly this toll thing, but then also not?","offset":2115,"duration":11},{"text":"Host: And, you know, when you net it all out stuff is getting through the strait. Like that world that we get into and you net it with all the damage that has been done—you know—there was like 20 billion dollars of damage done to the Qatar LNG facility.","offset":2126,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: There's—there's still durable damage as well. When you put that all together, like do you—what do you see the probability of markets just trying to look past this whole thing and and move on? Or how much of it is like, \"Okay, we've done too much damage, we need to discount this further.\"","offset":2140,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Yeah, I never try to denigrate Mr. Market because Mr. Market is probably smarter than all of us are. At least to some—at least at some level. That said, you know, markets can also be overly optimistic even as things are starting to break.","offset":2155,"duration":18},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Like think about how long it took for markets to appreciate the risk of the Russia-Ukraine war, or to appreciate what was happening in 2007, 2008. It's not like markets are always the leading indicator, and sometimes they lag considerably in terms with that.","offset":2173,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I also think you have to think in terms—you know—this is—I was relatively optimistic about the US economy going forward. And I was optimistic for precisely some of the reasons that we already talked about. Like multipolarity and deglobalization means that within these regional spheres of influence that are powered by these regional potential regional hegemons, you're going to get more investment and more capex and government support of technology and also some of these physical parts of the economy.","offset":2189,"duration":27},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So I think even with, as we're talking about, the long-term ramifications of the disruption in the Middle East, everybody's going to be worse for it. Like nobody is walking out of this conflict better for there having been a disruption.","offset":2216,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But at a relative level, some countries will have done better than others. The United States is a country that is poised to do better than most others in the world. It's far away from geopolitical zones of conflict. It has cheap and secure access to energy and to food. It is still in many ways at the commanding heights of technological innovation.","offset":2229,"duration":17},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: There's a lot going for the United States. And that's one of the reasons why it's so baffling that the United States did this. Like if President Trump had just kept doing what he was doing, if Cuba had been next rather than Iran, you know, we might have been talking about a very different economy going into the midterms.","offset":2246,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: China is a country that I think is going to do relatively well. And I know that some people will now like say, \"Oh, he's a CCP shill\" or whatever, and don't worry, I'm—I'm still waiting for my CCP payments for saying bullish things about China.","offset":2262,"duration":11},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But China, I think, is well—has been preparing for this for years. Who's leading the world in terms of rolling out renewable capacity? It's China. China's not doing that because it makes sense from an economic perspective to do so.","offset":2273,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: That is because the communists on high said, \"We will do this, because we watched the Americans in the Middle East for 20 and 30 years and we don't want to participate in that.\" Yes, we are still dependent on importing from the Persian Gulf, but we envision a world 10-15 years from now where we've got nuclear and solar and wind and everything else and that we become a center of green, you know, energy technology.","offset":2285,"duration":20},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: A, because that's nice, but B, because this is an existential issue for us. We don't want to have our energy blocked because of something that's happening in the Strait of Hormuz.","offset":2305,"duration":8},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Then you've got countries like—I mean—Saudi Arabia used to be on this list. I don't know that it still can be. But say a country like Chile, which is far away from geopolitical zones of conflict, which can have incredibly low cost of energy because of the solar, wind, geothermal potential that lies there.","offset":2313,"duration":13},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And so that's going to be an ideal case for you to do things with data centers or internet of things or automation or robotics and things like that. So I think you will find pockets of opportunity throughout the world, and it's about, you know, putting perspective on which places are going to do relatively better than others even despite this disruption.","offset":2326,"duration":21},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The one that is most out there is—is Europe. And I—I remain pretty optimistic about Europe's future. I think Europe gets left for dead too often and Europe's obvious flaws overshadow its strengths, which is: It's still an incredibly rich and wealthy place. It's a place that thinks it's geopolitically relevant that has lots of technological advantages that it can deploy.","offset":2347,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: If you're in Central or Eastern Europe and you've bet your energy future on first Russia and then on cheap energy supply coming out of the Middle East, okay, you're going to be in for some tough years. But that's not the story of France, that's not the story of Spain, that's not the story of some of these other countries.","offset":2369,"duration":14},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And they exist not—I mean, I wish it was a confederation, it would make it easier—but they exist in this European Union. And so those countries are going to have to look at each other and say, \"We have to stop letting Hungary hijack our priorities going forward and make some pretty serious decisions about where we're—what we're going to do to stay relevant.\"","offset":2383,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I think the EU will do that. You can make a very compelling case that they won't and that I'm just whistling into the wind here. But that I think is a block that could use the—the impetus of this crisis to do things that people today maybe aren't appreciating as possible. Like those are places that I'm going to be interested in going forward.","offset":2399,"duration":19},{"text":"Host: Interesting. Okay, I want to double-click on the China thing a little bit because there's two things that are interesting to me that I've been noticing. One of them is just how quiet they've been throughout this whole crisis. Um, really haven't been that verbose or explicit about the whole thing.","offset":2418,"duration":14},{"text":"Host: And the other one too is if you rewind pre-Iran strikes when the Venezuela thing was happening, there was this whole emergence of the Donroe Doctrines, spheres of influence and a lot of speculation that it's like we're, you know, aligning the chess pieces to go after the—the big dog that is China.","offset":2432,"duration":17},{"text":"Host: Um, and you know we want to cut off all their oil supply. So we're cutting Venezuela and now we're going to Iran and now we're going to cut off the Strait of Hormuz and all that oil going to China. How are you thinking about those two dynamics?","offset":2449,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Well, let's take the last one first. We hurt over Japan, South Korea, India way more than we did China. Remember, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, all he did was turn Russia from a great power into a Chinese gas station.","offset":2459,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So China's—I'm not saying that China's energy secure, but they have more reserves, more renewable capacity online and a relationship with Russia. That is not something that your Japans and South Koreas and Indias can say.","offset":2474,"duration":19},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So in that sense, okay, if you're trying to hurt China with that 5D chess, you actually hurt your allies much more. Um, if you think I'm being too hysterical about that, think about what's happened in the Philippines over the past couple of weeks.","offset":2493,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The Philippines was one of the first countries in Asia to declare an energy emergency because of what's happening in the Hormuz—in the Strait of Hormuz. A couple days after that, the Marcos Jr. government announced that they were restarting talks with China about joint exploration in the West Philippine Sea and the South China Sea for offshore energy deposits.","offset":2505,"duration":16},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: That's wild. The Philippines is a US defense treaty ally. We spent years worrying about the Duterte administration getting friendlier with China and doing exactly this. It took just a couple of weeks and this war of choice in Iran for the Philippines to start looking at China and saying, \"Huh, maybe we should have a more pragmatic relationship with China. Maybe this is a country that we can do business with even in the South China Sea, even around Taiwan.\"","offset":2521,"duration":25},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So you've—you've hurt the allies more than you've hurt China there. And I think China has more reserves than folks expected. Also as for the Taiwan issue, man, can we just put it to bed finally?","offset":2546,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: Because if China's not going to invade Taiwan now, with the United States bogged down in the Middle East and using all the Tomahawk missiles and everything else like that, okay, I'm waiting. Are they going to go for it? Is now the time?","offset":2558,"duration":-1069},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: No, now's not the time, because they're not thinking about it that way. They're thinking about Taiwan the way they thought about Hong Kong in the 70s and 80s. They want to isolate it economically, they want to isolate it politically.","offset":1489,"duration":1091},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: They want to get to the point where nobody cares enough about Taiwan so that when they announce that they are taking it, nobody puts up a fight to stop them, which is exactly what happened with Hong Kong.","offset":2580,"duration":9},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: The UK went back to renew the lease, Margaret Thatcher—that great British nationalist herself—Deng Xiaoping said, \"Cool, we'll cut off the energy and the infrastructure and the water and we'll blockade it if that's what you want to do. Is that what you want?\"","offset":2589,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And Thatcher said, \"I think I'll go to the Falklands to wave the British flag around. Like you can have it.\" And then we had, you know, one country, two systems, blah, blah, blah. That is the move that China's playing for when it comes to Taiwan.","offset":2604,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: I don't think there's any universe in which China was going to invade Taiwan. The most interesting thing I think that's gone unreported in all this, and obviously lots of things have to go unreported because the war is that important. It's crowding out a lot of things.","offset":2614,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: But before the war started, you had a huge diplomatic dust-up between Japan and China. The Takeichi government really pushing China's buttons on Taiwan and some of these things.","offset":2626,"duration":10},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And Japan has been deploying long-range missiles and military capacity to places that China doesn't like. And so China has announced, \"Oh, okay. Well now for the next 40 days, we're going to be controlling airspace in areas of the East China Sea as we do some things that we're not going to tell you about.\"","offset":2636,"duration":15},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: So some interesting friction back and forth there between China and Japan. So there are things to watch for. I'm not saying that China is some benevolent power that isn't scheming here, but they are scheming to take Taiwan by not firing a shot.","offset":2651,"duration":12},{"text":"Jacob Shapiro: And ironically, everything the United States is doing is helping that future come into being. But I think China's watching, you know, Russia's failed attempt to take Ukraine, the US's failed attempt at least thus far to, you know, change the regime in Iran and saying, \"Okay, well why would we try to do something that's orders of magnitude harder, which is an amphibious invasion of a hardened island that, you know, we're not going to be able to take without destroying the things that make it valuable in the first place.\" Like I just don't think China thinks that—thinks strategically that way. I think they're thinking longer term.","offset":2663,"duration":33},{"text":"Host: Yeah, I mean, yeah, seems like the easy narrative is that China's always just thinking longer term. But I—but I am curious...","offset":2696,"duration":4},{"text":"Host: What about, like, the next couple years? Like right now, you know, is their main priority just, you know, what's the quote again? Of, you know, \"don't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.\" Are they just kind of sitting by the sidelines and just watching this all happen? And they're like, \"Well, you know, eventually this is just going to make... it's probably going to make it easier for us in one form or another, not sure how, but I'm just going to wait for the dust to settle.\" What do you think?","offset":2700,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob: There's a couple ways I would answer that question. The first is, even though China really is only communist in name and form, like China's economic policies are not communist, they're sort of a weird state capitalism, like authoritarianism plus Ronald Reagan supply-side reforms in a weird bastardization together, but the form of Chinese politics is still very Marxist and very communist.","offset":2722,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob: And if you've been raised as a Marxist, um, then you look at the United States and say, \"Oh, this is late-stage capitalism. This is the late-stage capitalist hegemon basically destroying itself.\" So to your point, why would we want to get in the way of that? I think Xi Jinping also realized, um, towards the end of the 2010s and into the early 2020s that he made a mistake.","offset":2744,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob: He thought China was stronger maybe than it was. You had the wolf warrior diplomacy happening all over the place and China starting to, uh, bare its teeth a little bit. Um, and I think he was able to walk that back and see that China wasn't quite ready for that. That China needed to be more accommodating, that it needed to be a pragmatic partner, and that there was actually an opportunity in US political volatility and instability to be that.","offset":2768,"duration":25},{"text":"Jacob: And it's been very successful over the past couple of years. Uh, remember the biggest geopolitical story of this year before the war, um, was not Venezuela, it was not Greenland, it was Mark Carney going to Davos and saying, \"I'm taking the sign out of the window. I think China's a more reliable partner right now than the United States is. And we have to think about Canadian national self-interest in that context.\"","offset":2793,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob: That's a huge diplomatic win for China, that it has been able to seem more stable and more accommodating in a global international political system to a country like Canada than the United States. I think that's a very important signal. So, China's not without mistakes, and it's a huge and arguably sclerotic bureaucratic authoritarian system, so it can and will make more mistakes.","offset":2815,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob: But I think you've definitely seen a shift in Chinese policy, uh, from the wolf warriors at the end of the 2010s to right now, which is to your point, hey, how can we work with some of these other countries? How can we figure out a way, um, to create these economic relationships with them that are not tied to political ideology, that are not tied to overt asks, that don't involve us raising tariffs or threatening to do things against countries who don't do the things that we want? I think that's working for them, and I think that's what they'll continue to do here going forward.","offset":2839,"duration":30},{"text":"Host: Awesome. Um, alright, we'll just kind of conclude here with just your final parting words or thoughts or recommendations for, for those of us like myself who are, you know, mostly focused on, on macro trading and we are, we are self-admitted tourists within this space and just trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Any final words on how to navigate this whole thing?","offset":2869,"duration":22},{"text":"Jacob: The, the last thing I would just say, and I know it's, I know it probably sounds silly to say this, like, 47 minutes into our conversation, um, but I'm still very optimistic about the global economy over the next five to ten years. I think a lot of the dynamics that we're talking about, they will be bad for some people, they will be great for others. They will be bad for some industries, they will be transformative for others.","offset":2891,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob: I think there's a lot of comparison out there, uh, between our current time and the 1930s, uh, for folks that are thinking, \"Oh my god, like, we're on the cusp of another World War.\" I don't think that at all. I, I think the right frame of reference, and it's not a perfect historical analogy, but is the 1890s because you had rising and falling great powers. You had, uh, a generational shift in energy from coal to oil.","offset":2915,"duration":26},{"text":"Jacob: Um, you had technological innovation, you had the rollout of electricity over a 20 to 30 year time horizon, which changed everything. You had the advent of modern fertilizers, which for the first time disconnected population growth from just how much you could grow in your own regional market. Um, it was an absolutely transformative time. Now, at the end of that period, yes, there was a World War because some countries got powerful enough that they thought that they could dominate the world, or there were these weird alliance structures that forced things into a, a structure.","offset":2941,"duration":30},{"text":"Jacob: And by the way, that was a war where nobody thought that war was going to last for four years, everybody thought it was going to be a short conflict, and then once they were in it, they all had to triple, quadruple down. Um, sound familiar to you? Anyway. My point is just that I think we're on the cusp of the 1890s. So, I have to keep in touch with everything that's going on in the headlines on a daily basis.","offset":2971,"duration":23},{"text":"Jacob: I find it truly annoying because the real stuff is happening in technological innovation. What is AI doing? How is it transforming our lives? How is it transforming productivity? What is next with robotics? What is next with automation? What is next with Internet of Things? Changing everything. I want to spend all of my brain power doing that, not on parsing IRGC propaganda or White House propaganda.","offset":2994,"duration":24},{"text":"Jacob: The energy transition is real, and it's not going to be like the switch from coal to oil. That's a lay-up, like, I wish I had been, you know, investing in the 1890s and I could have been like, \"Yes, buy shares of Standard Oil and then we will go to golf and not touch them for another 60 years,\" like, probably would have been the best trade ever, right? But we're not going from oil to something else, we're going from oil to everything else.","offset":3018,"duration":23},{"text":"Jacob: So does that mean that you invest in the energy technologies themselves? Does that mean you invest in the picks and shovels that build the energy themselves? Is this a story about electrification and the grid and everything that it has to do to support this? Is it all the above? Is it really just you want the companies that are going to benefit from, and it's hard to think about this in 2026, but cheaper energy?","offset":3041,"duration":20},{"text":"Jacob: Because by 2030, 2035, probably energy is deflationary, no matter what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz. That's something I want to spend my time talking about. Um, so, you know, you can get wrapped up in everything that's happening in headlines and you can't ignore it because if you ignore it, you ignore potential challenges to those theses or data points that you really need in terms to update that.","offset":3061,"duration":23},{"text":"Jacob: But I, I am sticking to my guns and I would encourage your listeners to stick to their guns. Develop a macro viewpoint, uh, create scenarios for that, and then start to see is this true or is there or is this not true? Even with all the doom and gloom that I've talked about here, I'm optimistic. I'm looking for opportunities to deploy capital in technological innovation, in the energy revolution, in electrification, uh, and in the recession of US global power into a multipolar world and the markets that are best-posed to benefit from that. That's what I do when I'm not forced to talk about whatever strange things are happening in the Middle East.","offset":3084,"duration":41},{"text":"Host: Boom. Very well said. I, yeah, could not agree more with that. Um, yeah, I feel like the thing I, I keep trying to remind myself, I don't know if you agree with this or not, is that look, despite everything going on, all these shortages, like, don't short human ingenuity and, you know, all shortages are followed by gluts is something that I've heard talked about. I don't know if you agree with that or not, but it just feels like interesting framing to at least try to anchor yourself to what's going to happen on the 5 to 10 year horizon here.","offset":3125,"duration":27},{"text":"Jacob: Yeah, I mean, I, I always... uh, I like Jimmy Carr, the, the comedian, and he had some... somebody asked him some question about optimism in the current world, and he had this great... he had this great answer. He was like, \"You know, 100 years ago, nobody really knew what a hot shower was. Like, just, like, you get hot showers all... like, we live in a world, like, I can go to my TV right now and stream anything I want in the entire world, and I can order some, you know, chicken wings on my phone to my house so I can eat them while I'm watching whatever I want on my TV.\"","offset":3152,"duration":25},{"text":"Jacob: I was talking to Claude earlier about, like, taking everything I've written for the last 20 years and putting it into a database, it's like, doing that right now. Um, I mean, life is, like, really incredible. I feel like we're, we're missing... that we're uh, actually in the good times right now.","offset":3177,"duration":17},{"text":"Host: Yeah. Couldn't agree more. Awesome, Jacob. Well, uh, where can folks go if they want to see more of your work and what you got going on?","offset":3194,"duration":6},{"text":"Jacob: Pretty simple. Just go to jacobshapiro.com or you can email me at jacob@jacobshapiro.com. There's the podcast, research, speaking, um, and maybe doing some interesting things, uh, sort of in-between things when it comes to investment, but but cooking on some things there. So, follow me there and and you'll see where the journey goes.","offset":3200,"duration":19},{"text":"Host: Awesome. Love it. Well, thanks for joining on here and giving us the geopolitical update. Appreciate it.","offset":3219,"duration":5},{"text":"Jacob: It's my pleasure, and we'll have to get, uh, cousin Marko on either individually or maybe we'll, uh, we'll force ourselves, the both of you, uh, on you. I'm not sure your hair will be able to handle...","offset":3224,"duration":9},{"text":"Host: That would be... that would be unreal. I, I would love that. Yeah. My hair will probably be on fire afterwards, but I'll just be a vessel for it and just enjoy the ride. But that would be awesome.","offset":3233,"duration":9},{"text":"Jacob: Yeah. Sounds good. Cheers.","offset":3242,"duration":2},{"text":"Host: Thank you.","offset":3244,"duration":15}],"logs":[{"elapsed":"0.0","message":"Downloading audio from YouTube...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"0.0","message":"Trying download with browser cookies (ad-free)...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"4.0","message":"⚠ Cookie download failed: WARNING: [youtube] [jsc] Error solving n challenge request using \"deno\" provider: Error running deno process (returncode: 1): \u001b[0m\u001b[1m\u001b[31merror\u001b[0m: Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: Cannot read prope","detail":null},{"elapsed":"4.0","message":"Retrying without cookies...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"32.8","message":"⚠ Downloaded without cookies — audio may contain ads","detail":null},{"elapsed":"32.8","message":"Audio downloaded (30.4 MB) in 32.8s","detail":"File size: 30.4 MB"},{"elapsed":"32.8","message":"Video title: The Iran War is Accelerating the End of Globalism | Jacob Shapiro","detail":null},{"elapsed":"32.9","message":"Audio duration: 53:23 (53.4 min)","detail":null},{"elapsed":"32.9","message":"Large audio (30.4 MB) — will use chunked transcription with gemini-3-flash-preview","detail":null},{"elapsed":"32.9","message":"Skipping full-file attempt — using chunked transcription for 53.4 min audio","detail":null},{"elapsed":"33.3","message":"Split audio into 2 chunks for transcription","detail":null},{"elapsed":"33.3","message":"Transcribing chunk 1/2 (starts at 0:00)...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"33.3","message":"Uploading audio to Gemini File API...","detail":null},{"elapsed":"38.5","message":"Audio uploaded in 5.2s","detail":"File ref: files/ra9jec8b78hr"},{"elapsed":"38.5","message":"Audio processed in 0.0s. 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