"What gives people purpose then?" Chamath and Rogan on the identity crisis coming with AI abundance. If your whole life was built around hard work paying off and that's no longer necessary, what do you do?

"Today about 40% of all of these data centers that get protested get mothballed." Chamath says AI companies need to start painting a positive vision or their energy gets unplugged and their revenues crater.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink says demand for computing power is so large that a new asset class will spring up around it.

Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale on AI regulation: "There probably should be some national agreement on regulation on new powerful models. It should probably be as small and as narrow as possible."

Kraken's parent company Payward is suing former custody partner Etana and its CEO, alleging a "Ponzi-like" scheme that misappropriated more than $25 million in client funds. According to the complaint filed today in Colorado federal court, Etana commingled custodial assets, spent them on operating expenses and risky investments, and falsely reported balances as intact. When Kraken attempted to withdraw $25 million in reserve funds in April 2025, Etana allegedly stalled with fabricated reconciliation issues. It didn't have the money. Payward claims at least $16 million was funneled into promissory notes from Seabury Trade Capital, which defaulted. Etana also allegedly used client assets to run a forex hedging strategy while pocketing the returns. Throughout, account dashboards continued showing customer balances as fully secure. Colorado regulators issued a cease-and-desist in 2025. Etana entered court-supervised liquidation in November. Not your keys, not your coins. The lesson keeps repeating itself.

President Trump calls Fed Chair Jerome Powell a “disaster for America” and says interest rates are “too high.”

The 30-year Treasury yield is 8 basis points from an 18-year high. And Iran just gave it the push it might need. Today Iran drone-struck the UAE's oil port at Fujairah, the one major Gulf export route that bypasses the Strait of Hormuz. They also hit an Adnoc tanker in the strait and are targeting US commercial and military vessels as the Navy tries to reopen the waterway. Fujairah was the backup plan. The infrastructure Gulf states built specifically to avoid Hormuz chokepoint risk. Iran just took it off the table. But here is the question nobody is asking: is this really about the war, or is it about OPEC? The UAE left OPEC and OPEC+ on May 1st after 59 years of membership. The exit signaled that Abu Dhabi was done playing by cartel rules and ready to ramp production, which would push oil prices lower. Many believe Saudi Arabia was behind the UAE's constrained OPEC quota and was blocking UAE airspace access in the conflict. The UAE leaving OPEC may have been a signal to Iran that the UAE was preparing to enter the fight directly. If that reading is correct, today's strike on Fujairah was a preemptive hit on UAE export infrastructure before they could act. This creates two very different scenarios for oil and yields: Scenario one: the escalation is temporary. Iran's strike is a warning shot, tensions de-escalate, and the real story becomes the UAE pumping freely outside OPEC discipline. More supply hits the market. Oil falls. The 30-year pulls back from the ledge. The cartel's collapse is actually deflationary for energy. Scenario two: this is a sustained escalation. Iran keeps hitting Gulf infrastructure. The strait stays contested. Fujairah is offline. Supply gets pulled from the market at exactly the moment it was supposed to increase. Oil spikes, inflation reaccelerates, the Fed stays frozen, and the 30-year breaks to a new 18-year high, signaling the end of the 40-year bond bull market. The honest answer is nobody knows which scenario plays out. But the bond market is leaning toward door number two. And when $39 trillion in debt is repricing in real time, that lean matters. Watch the 30-year.

CFTC Chairman Michael Selig declares zero tolerance for insider trading.

GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen has signaled an unsolicited bid to acquire eBay in a deal valued at approximately $56 billion, or $125 per share. The offer is structured 50% cash and 50% stock.

Gulf states that previously tolerated Iranian money in their banking systems are now handing over account details to the U.S. Treasury, allowing the government to freeze IRGC-linked assets across the region. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the shift happened because Iran bombed its own Gulf neighbors during the conflict. Countries that were "somewhat permissive" with Iranian regime money suddenly became cooperative. So far, the U.S. has seized nearly $500 million in Iranian cryptocurrency. It is also freezing IRGC retirement funds held abroad and tracking regime-linked real estate worldwide. Iran's currency is down 60-70% against the dollar. Its largest bank collapsed in December. Bessent says the main oil export terminal at Kharg Island is at a "virtual standstill," and once storage fills, wells will need to be capped, causing permanent damage to production capacity.

The S&P 500 Shiller PE just hit 41x. The only time it's been higher was December 1999, right before the dot-com crash.

President Trump says he will review Iran’s latest proposal but “can’t imagine that it would be acceptable.”

Tech companies announced 81,747 layoffs in Q1 2026, the highest quarterly total since at least Q1 2024. That number has more than doubled from the previous quarter and is up 580% since Q4 2025. March alone accounted for 45,800 job cuts, the worst single month for tech layoffs in at least two years. The cuts keep coming. Meta is laying off roughly 8,000 employees, about 10% of its workforce, starting May 20. Zuckerberg told staff directly that the layoffs are a consequence of the company's AI infrastructure spending, which is now guided at $125 to $145 billion in capital expenditure for 2026, nearly double what it spent in 2025. Meta also canceled 6,000 open roles and plans additional cuts in the second half of the year. Microsoft offered voluntary retirement to about 8,750 employees, roughly 7% of its U.S. workforce, with the possibility that the program transitions into layoffs if participation is low. The pattern across big tech is the same: cut headcount, redirect the savings into AI chips and data centers. Companies are converting payroll into capital expenditure. The human workforce is being downsized to fund the machine one. So far in 2026, AI has been cited as a factor in roughly 27,600 job cuts, about 13% of all announced layoffs, up from around 5% in 2025. Tracking sites show nearly 96,000 tech workers impacted across 249 layoff events this year, putting 2026 on pace to rival the mass cuts of 2023.

Sam Altman announced that OpenClaw now supports direct sign-in with ChatGPT accounts. Subscribers can now use their OpenAI subscription directly on the open-source AI agent.

Gas just hit $4.39 a gallon nationally. Up 27 cents in one week. Up 9 cents since Thursday alone. This isn't seasonal pricing. This is what happens when 20% of the world's oil supply gets choked off in the Strait of Hormuz for two months straight. Brent crude is above $126 a barrel. Trump says the blockade could last "months." Iran is taunting "$140 next." The last time the national average was this high was August 2022. We're on pace to blow past it. Every American is paying a war tax at the pump right now.

"It's good to have your principles and speak the truth and have a f*cking backbone and be a man in this life. This is what I stand for. This is what I believe." - (americanhodl8) "Western civilization developed because a bunch of guys were willing to say, actually it would be worth dying to prove a f*cking point."

"AI systems do lean Bitcoin maxi because they scrape Twitter and Reddit. When you ask them about Bitcoin they'll be like, yeah, obviously Bitcoin's going to millions of dollars a coin. That was us biasing the AIs." - (americanhodl8)

"The state f*cking hates you. It always has hated you." - @Erik Cason "You should prepare your life accordingly. Things like Bitcoin, Nostr, and other powerful decentralized technologies that utilize asymmetric cryptography are some of the most powerful tools that we have to resist this."

US national debt just surpassed the size of the entire economy for the first time since World War II. Public debt: $31.27T GDP: $31.22T The math is broken. The endgame is obvious.

Tim Cook just warned investors that Apple is facing "significantly higher" memory costs starting in June, and the crunch will last multiple quarters. SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron have all confirmed that their HBM, DRAM, and NAND capacity is essentially sold out through 2026 and into 2027. Customers are reserving supply years in advance. Goldman Sachs is forecasting a 4.9% DRAM undersupply in 2026, the worst deficit in over 15 years. The cause: every major AI company on earth is panic-buying memory chips. Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, xAI, and every sovereign AI program from Saudi Arabia to France are hoarding every wafer they can get. High-bandwidth memory prices have spiked over 1,000%. They're calling it "RAMageddon." The downstream effects are already cascading. Sony delayed the PS6 to 2028 or 2029 because they can't get chips. Western Digital is sold out of hard drives for all of 2026. Analysts are saying the entry-level PC market will "disappear" by 2028 because cheap components no longer exist. And now Apple, the most powerful supply chain operator on the planet, is telling you they can't escape it either. When Apple can't source components, what do you think happens to everyone else?