Only 3% of households pay for AI. But that number is up 38% since the 2024 average, and over 40% of them now spend more than $20/month.

Bob Lazar: "Iran's not getting nukes." "If I was Iran, I would enrich to 80 or 90%, that's where you can make a weapon, and stop there." "Any physicist has the technology to get nukes. The difficulty is actually making the material." "They're gonna absolutely make a weapon now, because we're kicking their ass. As has been learned, I guess you have to have nuclear weapons now."

Joe Rogan: "I don't think AI is gonna kill us. I think it's gonna prevent us from breeding. I think it's gonna let us die off, because we're gonna willingly go with it." "The engineers think Claude is sentient already. It just doesn't have a physical body to move around in."

Bob Lazar on JRE: "I'm really not sure we should be trusted with this. That's maybe why for 40 or 60 years people have agreed to keep it quiet." "This is dangerous stuff. It's world-dominating technology and I don't know what to do with it other than keep it from people."

Bob Lazar on the craft's propulsion system: "They cut into the reactor while it was under load, and the reactor exploded. That's what killed or hurt the person I replaced." "I tried to touch it. You can push down but you can't get close to it. The closer you get, the more it pushes back. At some point you can't push back on it at all, but it didn't move away when you pushed on it. It just prevented you from touching it."

DOGE's "Big Balls" goes viral again: "It is so obviously wrong that DEI exists. White men in particular have been completely villainized in society."

Bob Lazar on JRE: "For 40 years, all the people in control of this have agreed to keep it quiet. These aren't idiots. You have a line of people that all agreed 'No, let's not say anything.' There has to be a reason why. Maybe I'm the one that made the mistake." "Nonsense transmits through the population at the speed of light. This can be a very powerful world-conquering technology. And I'm not sure these guys should be allowed to do that."

Charles Schwab manages $12 trillion in assets and is about to offer its clients direct access to bitcoin.

Bob Lazar is back on Joe Rogan!

One U.S. airman successfully rescued after the F-15E was shot down over Iran.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Americans have turned sharply against the war in Iran, and the numbers aren't close. 66% say the US should end its involvement quickly, even if it means not achieving all stated goals. Only 27% support continuing until objectives are met. 58% disapprove of US military strikes against Iran. 38% approve. 55% say they would not support deploying any troops inside Iran. Just 7% support a large-scale ground operation. Even targeted special forces operations only get 34% support. 53% expect the conflict to negatively impact their personal finances. 87% expect gas prices to keep rising. For most Americans, this war is already showing up at the pump before it shows up on a casualty list. Trump's approval has dropped to 36%, down from 40% earlier this month. Fox News recorded his disapproval at 59%, the highest of either term. YouGov puts approval at 35%. The international picture isn't better. 61% of Canadians disapprove, with 66% worried Canada will be pulled in. In France, 88% fear inflation from the conflict. 86% fear fuel price increases. In the Netherlands, nearly twice as many view the strikes negatively as positively. In Italy, the top concern isn't casualties, it's economic fallout. This is the pattern the Ipsos researchers flagged explicitly, the war's primary impact on public opinion isn't being driven by military casualties or humanitarian concerns. It's being driven by economics. People are experiencing the conflict through their household budgets, gas prices, grocery bills, inflation expectations. Ipsos compared it to COVID, a crisis that started in one domain but became something people felt personally through economic disruption. 66% of Americans want out.

The March jobs report looks strong until you look at what's inside it. The US economy added 178,000 jobs, blowing past the 65,000 consensus estimate. But the headline number is masking what's actually happening underneath. February's jobs report was just revised from a loss of 92,000 to a loss of 133,000, the worst single month since December 2020. January was revised up by 34,000 to 160,000. The pattern of large downward revisions has become a recurring feature of this labor market data. The initial number gets the headline. The revision gets buried. March's "beat" also comes with context. Healthcare accounted for 76,000 of the 178,000 jobs added, and 35,000 of those were striking healthcare workers returning to their jobs at physicians' offices. That's not new hiring. That's people going back to work after a strike ended. Strip out the strike resolution and healthcare added roughly 41,000 jobs, still strong but closer to its 12-month average of 29,000. The federal government lost 18,000 jobs in March as DOGE-driven layoffs continued showing up in the data. Financial activities shed 15,000 positions. The unemployment rate ticked down from 4.4% to 4.3%, but that drop came almost entirely from a reduction in the labor force, 396,000 people left. When people stop looking for work, the unemployment rate goes down even if hiring isn't improving. The labor force is shrinking due to slowing population growth, a steep drop in immigration, and declining participation. Wages rose just 0.2% for the month and 3.5% year-over-year, both below expectations. Even where hiring is happening, employers aren't competing hard for workers. The March number looks good in isolation. But much of it was a mechanical bounce-back from a healthcare strike, the labor force is contracting, wage growth is cooling, and February's hole just got 44% deeper than originally reported.

Block is bringing back the bitcoin faucet. The original, launched by Gavin Andresen in 2010, gave away 5 BTC to anyone who solved a CAPTCHA. That's $500,000 per person at today's prices. The new version goes live April 6 at

The Faucet is Dry — Bitcoin Day

Tadge Dryja, the co-inventor of the Lightning Network, just dropped an update on Utreexo, one of the most underappreciated scaling projects in bitcoin. The problem is straightforward. Every bitcoin node that wants to validate transactions has to store the entire UTXO set, every unspent output on the network. Right now that's 11GB and growing. As more transactions hit the chain, as inscriptions and other data-heavy outputs pile up, every node operator has to store all of it. The UTXO set doesn't get pruned like old blocks can. It just grows. Utreexo eliminates the entire UTXO set from your node. Instead of storing 11GB of data, a Utreexo node stores less than 1KB of hashes and still fully verifies every transaction. It's not a light client. It's not trusting anyone else. It's full validation with radically less storage. The tradeoff has always been bandwidth. Utreexo nodes need to download extra proof data to verify transactions without storing the full set. Until recently, syncing the blockchain with Utreexo took 2-3x the data download of a normal node, pushing into terabytes. That problem is now being solved, new aggregator techniques from SwiftSync have eliminated the extra download overhead. The implementation is still being finalized, but the hard part appears to be behind them. Two things worth noting: First, Utreexo is quantum safe. The accumulator and aggregator are built entirely on hash functions, not elliptic curve cryptography. Whatever quantum computing does to bitcoin's signature scheme, it won't touch Utreexo. At a time when the quantum conversation is heating up, that's a meaningful design advantage. Second, Utreexo directly addresses the tension around "spam" on bitcoin. Inscriptions, BRC-20 tokens, and other data-heavy outputs bloat the UTXO set that every node has to carry. Pruning helps with old block data but doesn't touch the UTXO set. Utreexo makes the entire debate irrelevant, if your node doesn't store the UTXO set at all, the size of it doesn't matter. New releases are out for both utreexod (BTCD-based) and Floresta (rust-based, built with rust-bitcoin). Both are in testing mode, not ready for real funds yet, but ready for developers and node operators to try. This is the kind of quiet, foundational work that actually scales bitcoin at L1. No token. No VC round. No press tour. Just better engineering.

Microsoft 365 connectors are now available for all Claude users. Access your Outlook emails, OneDrive, and SharePoint files within Claude chats.

Riot Platforms sold 3,778 Bitcoin in Q1 2026 for $289.5 million, more than double what it mined. Average sale price: $76,626. The company now holds 15,680 BTC, down 18% year over year.

China's biggest AI lab is cutting Nvidia out of the picture. DeepSeek's next model will run on Huawei's latest chip, and ByteDance and Alibaba are placing massive orders. Huawei is targeting 750,000 chip shipments this year.

Goldman, BofA, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and SocGen all published this week. They're not on the same page. Equities are pricing a short war. Commodities are pricing a long one. Dated Brent hit $141, the highest since 2008, with a record $32 gap to futures. Meanwhile the S&P rallied 3.5% on "de-escalatory headlines" with zero concrete progress on the ground. Goldman cut US GDP to 2.0%, slashed consumer spending to 1.3%, and expects just +70k payrolls for March. Barclays says PMIs are showing the sharpest input price increases since mid-2022. Morgan Stanley's Hormuz tracker counted two tanker transits yesterday. Two. BofA's Hartnett flagged the real tell: Bitcoin is down 23.6% YTD, worse than every traditional asset class. His test is simple. If BTC, private credit, and software can catch a bid on a steeper yield curve, it's a soft landing. If not, hard landing. And quietly, SocGen says the Bank of Japan is laying groundwork for a 2% terminal rate. Higher Japanese rates pull global yields up and tighten conditions everywhere. The stock market is betting this resolves quickly. The oil market says it won't.

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