The Moment Trump Leaves the Iran War, the Petrodollar Dies Forever Professor Jiang explains how the US economy is like a giant Ponzi scheme dependent on Gulf nations investing in American tech. If Iran forces the Gulf to abandon the petrodollar for food security, the US economy will face total collapse and revolution in the streets. For 50 years the petrodollar system forced the world to buy oil in U.S. dollars, then recycle those dollars into U.S. Treasuries and assets. That artificial demand is what kept the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. These same Gulf States are massively leveraged. They’ve borrowed heavily from Western banks to fund megaprojects, sovereign wealth plays, and lifestyle. When the oil money stops, they default. Those defaults cascade straight into the global banking system and the AI infrastructure bet. Jeff Currie, former Goldman Sachs head of commodities and lifelong insider of the dollar system, just laid out the one line America cannot cross. Handing control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran is not a tactical retreat. It is the formal end of the United States as global hegemon and the death of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that Iran had its “throat on the Strait of Hormuz” for 45+ years and told the Trump administration to “finish this thing and finish it right.” Bank of America’s desk reported that U.S. now only has 43-day emergency buffer of crude oil left in 45-year low.

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇷 Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s most influential billionaire backers, says the Iran war was a MISTAKE “I think we should not have done it. There were a lot of mistakes that were made.” Thiel made the comments last week during a private lecture in Nashville. He also raised the question no one in the GOP wants to answer <2 weeks before the midterms: “Maybe we don’t have the hard power. Maybe we’re going to lose the soft power war.” Thiel co-founded PayPal and Palantir, donated $1.25 million to Trump’s 2016 campaign, was a key WH advisor during Term I, and poured millions into JD Vance’s Senate primary that put him on the path to VP. His data company Palantir is actively assisting Trump’s deportation operations today. He still supports Trump. But his assessment of the Iran war is damning. When a donor this close starts saying “we should not have done it,” you can bet the White House is listening. Source: Daily Mail, Politico / Writer: Michael

$SOFI just launched SOFIE which is the first national bank-issued tokenized deposit for consumers offering 4.40% interest with FDIC insurance eligibility. That’s where SoFi’s bank charter becomes a real advantage because it can attract on-chain deposits that help fund its lending business while customers continue earning interest.

JUST IN: Central banks worldwide are quietly stockpiling 4x more gold than usual and moving it out of the US, Fortune reports.

Sharing some key takeaways from $META's earnings, which I think matter not only for $META but for the broader industry. The biggest one is that $META can actually disrupt e-commerce: 1. The core business benefits enormously from AI and LLMs, as it helps both with engagement and with targeting. The improvements caused by AI are fueling a lot of the core growth each quarter by a few % points, which has a significant compounding effect on $META. The great thing is that $META doesn't yet see any ceiling in terms of when this might stop: Zuck: »Beyond serving other businesses, we have not yet found the limit of how effectively we can apply compute to accelerating our own core business« 2. When it comes to the core, $META has finally figured out a very effective way to monetize the influencer economy that happens on their platform. Partnership ads are growing +97% YoY at a $15B annual run rate! And they just started to roll them out more globally. The size and opportunity here, in the short term, acting as a $META tailwind, is big even for a company of $META's size. 3. Muse is $META's next big vertical, and it can disrupt the whole e-commerce complex. $META laid out its vision quite clearly: multiple Muses, both as consumers and as small businesses, interacting with each other. This creates a network effect similar to the one Facebook had in the early days. You want your Muse to interact with your family and friends' Muses; at the same time, the future might be your Muse interacting with a small-business Muse to engage in commerce. The key thing here is that $META has the perfect ecosystem to execute that. They have over 3.6B users + over 500M businesses using their products for advertising, etc. The scary part for the commerce industry is that businesses could start to see a lot of their commerce done via agents and agent interaction inside $META's platforms instead of the aggregators' websites. The e-commerce market, over time, becomes disrupted, and the economics shift so that $META takes a take rate on transactions occurring in this market. The potential of this business is much bigger than $META's core business, which is hard to imagine. Zuck mentioned this: »From a business perspective, the average revenue per American user for our existing Muse users is -- sorry, for our existing Family of Apps users is several hundreds of dollars annually, and we expect that Muse will reach an even higher level over time due to the amount of commerce that we already see taking place.« Muse is already very much used to conduct commerce: »The most common use case for Muse is shopping, with more than 1/4 of people who are using Muse engaging in this with an average purchase size of over $200« 4. Muse is burning a lot of infra right now to serve, but over time those costs are significantly lower, so I don't worry about the profitability of this business model. The fact that costs are high today to serve its users actually plays to $META's advantage, as not many companies can offer this much infrastructure to support scaling this product today, which gives $META a strong first-mover advantage. 5. $META's Muse is entering a phase where $META dominates in the world of tech: »Now that Muse has clear product-market fit, we are entering a new phase and a more operational phase that is focused on scaling it. The goals for this next phase play to many of Meta's strengths. We need to do 3 things: scale the product, grow revenue and optimize compute costs.« 6. There are also some good nuggets that I saw as hints (I might be stretching here, but I don't think so). One is that we might have a hint that an $AMZN deal for Muse might be coming. When Zuck was asked about companies blocking Muse and not wanting to embrace it, he said this: »And obviously, not everyone wants to be an early adopter. That's fine. We'll work with folks on the terms that makes sense for them.« 7. Mark mentioned that $META will monetize Muse sooner than they get to 1B users than monetize the $META playbook, which is something that shouldn't be a surprise given the costs associated with running a product like that on a 1B user scale. Also associated with monetization, I found it interesting that $META's CFO Susan mentioned between the lines that transaction revenue might already be part of 2027 revenue: »we expect that those can begin contributing incremental revenue in 2027, but more importantly, can scale meaningfully over time. And those will include monetizing our AI products through subscriptions, transactions, advertising, developing enterprise offerings, as we talked about in one of the earlier questions.« 8. The last thing we got was $META doing a new share class to basically fund the continued investment in the infrastructure. I think we all knew this is coming. The question is: is there enough external capital to finance all of this, given that we also had $SPCX earnings, where their plans will have to include heavy external financing as well, not to mention all of the neocloud space? The market will be the limiter. I will do a more in-depth analysis on this topic in a future newsletter article.

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Sparks of abundance by 2029

Recursive Flint is here: our first model, built with the Eureka Machine. Fast, local coding. Open weights available on Hugging Face.

I getting a feeling that OpenAI and Anthropic soon will ditch customers completely, just use their models 100% internally and go all in on frontier science and engineering research Like eg if they actually solve quantum gravity or cure cancer, and own the right to license the solution, can you imagine the ROI behind that? No more listening to users bitching about usage or model nerf or whatever

Meta CFO Susan Li reveals LLM-based ad systems are lifting conversions: a new “Meta Generative Recommender” added nearly 2% on Facebook feed, and the GEM ranking model added 9.6% for app ads “Within our ad systems, we are continuing to drive performance gains as we deploy more predictive models that understand users more deeply and deliver ad experiences better aligned with their unique preferences while also making our infrastructure more efficient.” “Last quarter, we introduced Meta Generative Recommender, which uses LLMs to reason across ad content and user preferences to predict the best ad for each person. In Q3, we launched this approach to generative retrieval on Facebook feed, driving a nearly 2% increase in conversions across targeted segments.” “In addition, we expanded our GEM model for ads ranking to additional surfaces, driving a 1.7% increase in conversions for off-site conversion campaigns and a 9.6% increase in app ad conversions. And we continue to scale our retrieval systems efficiently. In Q3, improvements to Andromeda, such as scaling model complexity and throughput, increased conversions by 1.4% on Facebook.”

Hermosos países, con gente increíble, incluiría a los uruguayos,

MAGA and Russian disinformation have massively fueled the separatist movement in Alberta, Canada. Nevertheless, Albertans overwhelmingly voted to remain part of Canada.

$META CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he is considering leaving California if it passes a measure that would impose a one-time 5% tax on billionaires. - Bloomberg

META CEO MARK ZUCKERBERG JUST SAID - SEES MUSE AI POTENTIALLY GENERATING HIGHER REVENUE PER USER THAN THE FAMILY OF APPS

Hillary Clinton: “The Republican Party is no longer a political party, it is a cult devoted to Trump and Trump’s power. The Republican Party needs a total transformation. If we’re gonna have a healthy government that actually gets things done and delivers for people, the Republican Party has to purge itself of everybody that lost both their conscience and their backbone over the last ten years and that’s most of them”

Claude Duet is an early research preview, available through a waitlist on Pro and Max plans in the US. It can still misjudge what’s urgent, and we’ll keep tuning it based on what early users tell us. Join the waitlist: claude.com/product/claude-du… Read more: claude.com/resources/article…

$META’s “EPS miss” is a $9.9B one-time legal charge from the state AG settlement. Strip it out and operating income was ~$22.9B vs ~$20.9B expected. The real story: price per ad +14%, Q4 guide in line, but free cash flow went negative for the first time as capex hit $35B. The 2027 capex number on the call matters more than anything in the release. xitter.cf/NextFinAI/status/21129…