Bitcoin’s Back, Venezuela Regime Change, Memecoins, 2026 Mega Trends

My take is that this is the new all-time-high run, and if you just hold on to your seat, you’re probably going to be able to sell at 125K at some point in the next 6 weeks.

1. 2026 Moves Just Starting

Oh man, Jonah, this has been a great start to the year. I have to say, everything is going really well except my prediction that memecoins were not going to stage a recovery in 2026. However, when I said that, you disagreed with me. To give you credit where credit is due, you said, “I wouldn’t just short it going into the new year. I would wait for a pop and then—”

I disagreed with you wholeheartedly, mainly because I was super bullish on Bitcoin, and I just know that when you get this massive drawdown in altcoins, you can never short if you’re bullish on the market, because you’re going to get these ridiculous rallies. That’s kind of what happened.

But I think the point still stands: in 2026, I think memecoins will probably not do particularly well in aggregate. Obviously, that means there will be periods of time where they do really well, like Pepe going up 70%.

That’s what I was scared of, which is why I said, “Hey, Jonah, I don’t know, maybe you want to wait for the pop before you get all bearish on memecoins.”

To my credit, I responded, “Yeah, you’re probably right about that.” And I didn’t short any because I was too lazy. So now, do we get short these things? They just freaking—

No, I’m not ready yet, just because I’m not ready to call the end of this move. I think that we’ve consolidated in this 85–90 area for such a long time now, and this looks very similar to the previous bottoms that Bitcoin held.

I think we’re in for a ride. I think the equity markets are in for a ride. Gold is in for a ride. We are off to a really, really great start this year, and the only thing that you probably shouldn’t be is sidelined.

I think that the move has just started, which is why last week I talked about buying these end-of-January 100K calls. I was pretty convicted that we were going to get a good start to the new year, and that seems to be what’s happening right now. I loaded up on those calls, and they’ve basically doubled so far.

I think there’s more to go. I think Bitcoin could easily tag 100K or 105K, at which point I’d be reducing a little bit. But the structure of the market and everything that’s happened over the last 7 days is very good.

It’s good to see that open interest—which basically means the number of leveraged traders in the system—isn’t banging the drum and getting in. They’re not getting over their skis right now. Funding rates are reasonably muted, and broader risk appetite seems to be back.

Gold continues to rise, and for the first time, we’re going up together with the rest of the market. That tells me that the sellers we were so scared of—those angry, aggressive, mean people who kept selling our beautiful Bitcoin to zero—they seem to have run out.

I don’t think we get more supply activation until you get above at least 100K. That’s my general take, and I know that’s not that far away, really. My take is that this is the new all-time-high run, and if you just hold on to your seat, you’re probably going to be able to sell at 125K at some point in the next 6 weeks.

Yeah, I think so too. That’s something that both of us did predict on the 1000x podcast: that Bitcoin would have a rip-roar in January because the selling’s done. People reengage, they sit down, they invest, and Bitcoin’s up 8% since the start of the year. It’s been 4.5 days, and that’s a big move.

I agree with you. I think it’s just the beginning. I think this is the run to fresh all-time highs. I’m fully invested as far as Bitcoin is concerned. I maintain a small percentage of my total crypto portfolio. It’s mostly Bitcoin, and then I maintain a small allocation to trade.

Last year, despite winning on Hyperliquid, that trading allocation was down. This year, I think I’m going to start expanding that trading allocation if we end up in some kind of altseason for the alts that I like.

I do not like memes. I don’t think they’re going to outperform Bitcoin over the course of the year in general. I still want to sell this pop; I just don’t know how or when, so I’m going to be monitoring it closely.

2. Ads (Kraken OTC)

I think that if we do get a rally in Bitcoin to the all-time highs, it’ll probably cascade through to ETH and then some altcoins, but not most of them, the way that it usually does. On that rally, you’ll have fantastic opportunities to short high-FDV, low-float, VC-unlock coins versus Bitcoin. Those pairs will look good.

Not all memecoins have performed the same way. My least favorite coin ever is up 40%. Pepe is the big one; it’s up 70%. SHIB is up 30%, and Fartcoin is up 33%.

So, basically, after you would have lost 90% or 80% being long memecoins versus BTC from the Trump Coin moment until the end of the year, they’ve outperformed Bitcoin by 20%. If you had just gone all in on Pepe, sure, you would have made 70%. But, on average, the memes—

Again, at the pico low. But still, I think the way that you run this is you basically say, “Look, you never want to get short anything generally when Bitcoin’s consolidating at lows.”

If you’re bullish on Bitcoin, you’re kind of saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” It’s very difficult to imagine a scenario where Bitcoin is going to rip up to 125K and the rest of the market is going to do poorly.

The way that you think about these things, and what I was trying to articulate on the last podcast, is that you have to wait for the move. You have to wait for the pop to play out.

Over the course of 2026, what I think you’re probably not going to see is a crazy memecoin mania with the old memecoins. It’s probably all the new memecoins that end up doing well. That was really the point of what I was trying to say on the last podcast.

Right now, I think you can focus on your large caps. You can focus on your BTC, and honestly, the highest-hit-rate trade for me is that when we were trading at 87, we were banging the drum that we were going to get a strong move, and we were going to get it quickly.

That’s what’s happening right now. Bitcoin is just breaking above 94 here. I think if you’re trying to make maximum money in 2026, Bitcoin calls, gold calls, palladium—it’s crazy. We were talking about it on the last podcast, and we got that 2x. It was like a Bitcoin move, an altcoin-like move, in 3 days.

Nasty. This thing dropped 25% off the highs, and guess what? It bounced right back up 14%. I think that’s just telling you what’s going on.

Ray Dalio put out a great piece this morning, which I think everyone should read. The core premise is something that we’ve been talking about for a while: the dollar is just getting destroyed. From basically every angle, the dollar is getting destroyed.

3. Debasement Trade Continues

Hard currencies and commodities are outperforming everything. Forget even the U.S. stock market. One point Dalio makes, which I think is very true, is that everyone’s talking about how AI is eating the world and how AI is doing really well, and yet somehow the S&P is massively underperforming gold.

So the question is: what’s really driving what? What is the real red herring in that argument?

That’s a red herring.

Hold on. What I’m trying to say is: what’s the real driving force in today’s world? The real driving force is the devaluation of currencies.

Yes, AI is a huge driving force, but the bigger driver—which is why gold was up 60% last year while equity markets were up 20%, regardless of whatever AI is doing—is that the real thing happening right now is a massive devaluation of currencies around the world.

That’s really good for Bitcoin. It’s really good for gold. It’s really good for silver. It’s really good for platinum. It’s also great for uranium, which I’ve been beating the drum on for a bit.

I’m ready to get back into uranium. I’d sold out a little bit, but now I’m ready to get back in. Maybe I sold out too early, but I’m ready to get back into this thing.

Yeah, I don’t think you’re too late on anything except gold. If you had a clean slate, the only thing that I would say is probably not the safest buy here, of the things you just mentioned, is gold.

I think Bitcoin's about to go ballistic. I think the stock market's going to continue going ballistic. The reason why I said it's a red herring—your argument about the stock market rallying less than gold—is that de-dollarization impacts both gold and the stock market. They're both USD-denominated. AI is not the only thing driving the stock market.

When you talk about the stock market, you're talking about the S&P 500. AI has secondary or tertiary, very indirect effects on most of those companies. Maybe 450 of them are, at best, a little smarter because of ChatGPT, and maybe a few middle managers get fired. But most of the AI gains really aggregate to Nvidia, Google, and the companies that rallied even more than gold did last year. So, I think the whole AI thing versus gold—you'd need to look at a more pure play than the entire stock market to make that comparison apples to apples.

4. Ads (Kraken OTC)

However, I do agree with your general premise, and I don't think the point you're making is invalid or anything. I just wanted to clarify it.

5. Memecoin Trenches & Shorting

As far as memecoins, one final thought on that. While you were talking, I generated an image since Nicolás Maduro lives in Brooklyn now, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, maybe I should go visit him.

I generated an AI image of hipster Williamsburg Nicolás Maduro.

What are you doing with your time?

It doesn't take much time. It takes less than 1 second to create this slop now. What I was thinking is, if this were 2024, I could create a hipster Maduro meme out of this image and probably send it to 10 million or 20 million people with a podcast, but that's just not happening anymore. So, that's kind of what I mean when I say that the memecoin space is a little bit fucked.

Yeah. To be fair, I don't know, because I didn't actually check, which I probably should have. There was a period of time, Jonah—I don't know if you remember this at all—where you could just monitor world events, and then, if anything happened, you would immediately go to DEX Screener and look for tickers related to that thing. You would inevitably find some sort of coin that had run to $50 million because everyone and their mother was gambling on this shit. I mean, dude, like the—

So, that's done.

Like Peanut the Squirrel, right? You remember that shit?

Oh, Peanut was amazing. Slerf, all sorts of things.

Yeah. Look, Maduro—this is the state of the trenches, man. You go look up Maduro, and the best thing that I can find is a couple million in market cap. That's pretty boring. What are you guys doing out there? But yeah, that's what I mean.

Basically, if WIF is up 38% with Bitcoin up 8%, that's just algo-on-algo violence. That's basically like WIF has established itself with a big enough market cap that some correlation bot is probably like, “Okay, it should be roughly 4.5× beta to Bitcoin. So, let me just bid it when it's up less than that beta and offer it when it's up more.”

But that's only sustainable for very short, illiquid periods of time. Over the long run, bag holders will try to get their liquidity when it goes up. That’s why I still like shorting this stuff. Apparently, it’s not as easy as I thought it would be. There’s a little bit of technique to it.

Should we talk about one? We've talked about this before. Remember when I was talking about how to think about shorting things in general? This was an episode a long time ago, but you always have to be very tactical with it. Generally, what you want to do is start shorting these things after they've made some sort of significant impulse-driven move off of some level, because that type of move is what draws in the old sellers, right?

6. Opportunities In Emerging Markets

It draws in the people who maybe don't want to sell off the lows, but if something's up 60% or 70% off the lows, now people are really willing to get in, and they're saying, “Okay, well, now this is my chance to finally exit this asset.” I think that's probably what's going to happen. Go look at Worldcoin. No matter how much Sam Altman tries to pump that thing, let's look at previous rallies off the lows. Worldcoin was up 200% off the lows once, and 160% off the lows another time. Right now, we're about 30% off the lows. So, maybe you want to wait until it gets back up to about—

1.25, and then that's the fucking greatest short of a lifetime, right?

Then you short that thing against Bitcoin, and you're sitting very pretty. I don't think that thing's moving particularly hard after that, right? At the end of the day, shorting is all about setups now.

Getting long is all about the entry—everything in trading, at the end of the day, is about the entry. It's like, where can you actually hold this thing? Where can you actually hold this trade? That's why I think you should probably move faster rather than slower if you're sidelined on Bitcoin right now, just because I think the market structure here looks very good, and it tells me, “Hey, things might be moving pretty quickly.”

This is going to look like a generational entry in 10 years. I really believe Bitcoin's going to 1 million dollars.

Yeah, maybe in 10 years. Yeah, of course, Jonah.

7. Venezuela/Iran Bitcoin Reserves

Well, we're talking about 1 month. This is going to be an entry for 1 month. I think it's going to be a grand slam in a month and a generational wealth-creation event over a 10-year time frame. Let me put it that way. I'm very bullish. I really am. I do not understand why this would go down.

Interestingly enough, we should probably carve out a bit of time to talk about Venezuela and Iran, because there are big geopolitical shifts happening, and it's going to matter for digital assets as well as other commodities, where there could potentially be a trading opportunity.

I will say this is rumor, not fact. Apparently, Venezuela had stockpiled quite a stack of BTC, and I knew that Trafigura allegedly was moving cargoes of Venezuelan oil around sanctions. At least, I'd heard rumors. Who knows if they've actually done it and taken payment in Tether or Bitcoin?

I would not be surprised. I know Maduro has a lot of gold. That's famous. There's a whole history behind that, which goes back 100 years, with U.S. involvement in Venezuela early during the 20th century. But for Bitcoin, I think they've been stacking it, and now the U.S. probably has access to that reserve, or is torturing people to get it and to get the seed phrase.

Basically, there are some questions: Will it get sold? Will it get rolled into the U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve? Will it get put into escrow? I think I would be shocked if they didn't just create the foundation of the SPR with seized Bitcoin. And so, I think we could see—

That's the whole point, right? The whole point of the SPR, the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, is so that in situations like this, you are able to accumulate that Bitcoin and shove it away.

With Venezuela, it's very, very, very likely—again, yes, this is rumor, but I think this is pretty well substantiated—that they were heavy in the Bitcoin mining space for a decent amount of time. Obviously, they have access to extremely cheap energy. They can mine Bitcoin at effectively 0 cost. And so, obviously, I think that as a sanctioned country, that's what they're going to be doing.

According to the rumors, that's probably what they have been doing, right? They've been accumulating—

Substantial amounts of Bitcoin, not only on the open market, but most likely through Bitcoin mining with their low cost of energy.

And so what that tells me—and I think this is actually perhaps one of the reasons for Bitcoin rallying—is that when you take down a narco-state like that, you probably remove some source of supply, right? These states are very likely using their Bitcoin mining as ways to fund their operations.

They're probably a net seller, not a net buyer, of Bitcoin, would be my guess. And so, taking down Venezuela and taking down Maduro and subsuming their entire operations into a country that does not sell any Bitcoin and that does not need Bitcoin to fund their operations, it's probably net beneficial for BTC.

This would be doubly true if Iran goes through regime change. My personal opinion: if Iran goes through regime change, you probably want to start buying a ton of Bitcoin calls. That's kind of the whole point of this podcast: us sitting here talking to each other, trying to logic our way to specific trades that we might want to take given the future, right?

Now you know: Bitcoin did really well after Venezuela got taken offline. Could have something to do with the fact that they were Bitcoin mining and supply was being taken offline. Iran's actually an even bigger player when it comes to this. It's known that they use Bitcoin to finance their operations.

That's half the reason Hamas had millions of dollars on Binance: Iran's love for Bitcoin. My take on this is that if you do see regime change in Iran, there'll probably be a delayed reaction from Bitcoin, and that gives you, the listener, time to probably go accumulate some calls.

Possibly even short-dated stuff, right? Like a week or 2 weeks out. Maybe you get a 5–6% pop in BTC. So I want Iran to fall for a variety of reasons, but this one would be good. This one's up there, you know.

In this one, anybody can be happy. Even if you're a lover of the Ayatollah and a Shia fundamentalist, you can get excited about being long Bitcoin and the Ayatollah falling, because Bitcoin will rally.

But yes, I agree with you. Going back to your conversation about Venezuela, power generation in Venezuela is mostly hydro. Hydro is a good way to generate power, but the most efficient way to generate electricity is through gas—burning natural gas in a turbine. One of the least efficient ways to do it is to burn crude oil or fuel oil.

This is an ecologically catastrophic, ultra-inefficient way to make electricity, and you'll see it in places with way too much crude, like Saudi Arabia, where it's getting phased out because they're smart. But in Venezuela, that's what they do to cover the gap. Venezuela was still a place where there were rolling blackouts and power was mismanaged.

But absolutely, Bitcoin mining was going on, both by individuals who were getting cheap, government-subsidized hydropower—probably just mining it at their homes and using it to pay for their lives—because the Venezuelan bolívar totally hyperinflated into worthlessness. Then the government was also probably using it to buy weapons, finance the drug trade, and do all sorts of other heinous, reprehensible stuff.

So that selling is going to stop if Venezuela becomes a normal economy, and that's probably bullish Bitcoin. Also, they were probably selling Bitcoin out of their strategic Bitcoin reserve to fund whatever it is that they needed to: bribes, payoffs, just to keep the house of cards from falling. That's all going to stop now, too, so there's just less selling pressure on the market.

The United States is probably going to tuck away that Bitcoin and never sell it. So I think that's a very bullish feature to the market: just not having a motivated seller funding narco-terrorism with Bitcoin.

Now, should we talk about the oil situation there and what it means for crude oil, and then go to Iran next?

I think a lot of people had conflicting opinions on what was happening here. Obviously, there was the idea that maybe the U.S. comes into Venezuela, and that leads to a short-term spike in oil because production is going to go down.

The other way of thinking about it is that if the U.S. comes into Venezuela and, over time, actually manages to open it up and U.S. companies come in, then production—which has collapsed by like 60% in Venezuela because of a lack of expertise in extracting this heavy crude—maybe goes back to what it looked like before, and then oil prices go down a ton.

You had a really good take on X, which I think maybe you can walk through.

Yeah. Feel free to ask any questions, because oil is very confusing and complicated, and people just don't understand it. I saw a lot of really, really dumb suppositions about what Venezuela means for oil. I said that oil would rally on Monday, and people were like, “You're crazy. This is the most bearish thing ever. Imagine being as stupid as Jonah.”

I may be a crypto larper, but I really know my stuff when it comes to oil, so I will definitely try to walk people through this. It's not intuitive.

8. What Happens To Oil?

Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves. What does that mean? It means that under Venezuela, there is more oil than there is under any other country on Earth, which is crazy to think about. They have something like tens of trillions of dollars' worth of oil at today's prices sitting underground.

People are like, “Oh my God, now it's all coming out. Oil is going to zero.” The answer is no, it's not, and here's why. Oil under the ground is worthless. Even oil above ground is worthless until it gets refined into something that we can actually use, like jet fuel or petroleum.

Even then, gasoline and jet fuel are still useless until an internal-combustion engine—which is another kind of mobile refinery—refines it into something useful called locomotion, or power in the case of Venezuela's super-inefficient power plants. So basically, there are a number of stages that have to be passed through in order for this oil under the ground to become valuable.

The world consumes about 105 million barrels of oil per day. A barrel holds 42 gallons. It's a little more than waist-high. It's a barrel. So 105 million of those get slurped up by refineries around the world every day.

Venezuela currently produces about 1 million barrels a day, so less than 1% of the world's consumption. Then you have to ask yourself: What matters for the price? It's how much do they export, right? They could consume all of it internally, and then Venezuela wouldn't matter.

Unfortunately, Venezuela is such a mismanaged disaster that they consume almost none of their oil and export most of it. So they export about—let's just say slightly under—1 million barrels a day to keep the math simple.

Their historical maximum production was 3–4 million barrels a day. Let's just say that they get back there. The situation where they get back there is the most bearish possible scenario: Venezuela becomes the 51st state of the United States. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but for the sake of understanding the boundary condition, imagine Trump makes Venezuela the 51st state.

I highly doubt it. That would be fucking hilarious.

It would be. Imagine. So we have to explore that. It's like Alaska, Hawaii, and Venezuela, and then the lower 48.

Basically, that would be the most bearish possible scenario. The geology of Venezuela is very complex. Some of the oil is solid at room temperature. You have to mix it with diluent just to make it consumable by a refinery.

A lot of Venezuelan oil used to go to the Gulf Coast refining center—Texas and Louisiana—back in the day, when that was just an easy source of oil. So all the refineries were configured to consume heavy, sour oil, which means high-sulfur, complex oil.

But now, obviously, because of the explosion of shale in the Permian Basin, there's ultra-light, sweet oil—almost something called condensate. It's not even oil; it doesn't generate any tar or fuel oil. It's really, really light.

Basically, the refining system over the course of the last 15–20 years has reconfigured from being optimized to consume Venezuela-like oil to being optimized to consume the opposite type of oil: light sweet. So you couldn't just throw a bunch of Venezuelan oil into the Gulf Coast refining system in America and expect it to work well.

It would blow up every refinery, and they would have all kinds of explosions, problems, and outages. It's like infrastructure. What people don't understand is that, unlike crypto, where tokens and money just move around easily and everything's kind of quasi-fungible, the physical commodities market is very different.

Unlike Saudi Arabia, where you stick a fucking toothpick in the ground and oil comes out, Venezuela, in order to restore production from its current 1 million-barrel-a-day run rate to its historical maximum from decades ago—3–4 million—would require years. It took Exxon like 5–10 years to explore the Guyana mega-field nearby.

It would probably take Venezuela a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 5 years to get them pumping 3–4 million again-ish. In that scenario, Venezuela's economy is consuming 2 million barrels a day because there are 30-plus million people living there.

So then your exports basically go from 1 million a day currently to 2 million a day there. That's an increase of 1 million a day. It would move the needle. It's probably worth a couple bucks lower in flat price, but it's not that big a deal. People just don't understand this.

They see the world’s biggest proven oil reserves and think you’re an idiot. They think it just magically comes above ground and hits the market. People should think of this more like a bunch of oil being discovered on the moon. That’s a more illustrative example because how do you get it to the refineries on Earth, right? It may as well be on the moon. It’s miles underground, right? And it’s not easy oil.

That’s the end of my rant. The final piece of this is that it’s a bit bearish long term, meh short term, but the regime-change thing—I think what’s more important is what this means geopolitically. Trump did this to exert leverage over China because China consumes a lot of Venezuelan oil, and it’s guaranteed supply that China gets at cheap prices because Venezuela couldn’t sell it anywhere else because of sanctions.

If Venezuelan oil hits the open market, then that’s another way for Trump to be able to sanction oil, as a chess move to prevent China from threatening Taiwan. China will lose more access to oil, which is critical for it. They don’t produce nearly enough there. China is the world’s biggest oil importer. They have a lot of oil they have to get, and if more of it is controlled by the United States, more of it can be taken away from China. More of their lifeline can be taken away if they do something the United States doesn’t like.

It also screws up the Russian refining arbitrage because Venezuela so mismanaged its refineries that they all went to shit. Basically, Venezuela was exporting crude to Russia. Russia was refining it and then sending refined products back to Venezuela and other places. This screws up Russia’s leverage over that.

It makes it harder for Russia, China, and Iran to place weapons in the Western Hemisphere on America’s doorstep. The final piece is that if Trump has now proven that he’s willing to literally just send in the Delta Force commandos—which is so freaking badass—to kidnap a guy who was the leader of a country, that can happen to Ayatollah Khamenei too. That would be bearish oil. Iran is a very different oil equation than Venezuela. That would be crazy bearish oil and probably pretty bullish Bitcoin.

9. Geopolitical Consequences

Oh man, honestly, I think you did a really great job outlining all of the different angles here. The last part that you said—if we can send in Delta Force to remove someone we say is not the legitimate leader but who, in reality, very much is the de facto leader of a country—where does that leave us when it comes to the rest of the world? What is the rest of the world going to do here?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that there are mass protests going on in Iran to remove the Ayatollah at the same time that Reza Pahlavi is, for the first time, really going hard on Twitter and other media sources. Likely Reza Pahlavi is the presumed leader of Iran in a transitional government. He’s the—

He has no rizz. That guy—

The guy has no rizz, unfortunately.

I actually said this to Jonah in a private chat. I think if Reza Pahlavi were 3 inches taller and better-looking, it would be over. Iran would have fallen yesterday. But, for whatever reason, he’s got no rizz. He’s got no way with words, so he’s kind of boring and lame.

But we love him. We want him to be in charge again. He’s way better than the Ayatollah. He’s not an Islamo-fascist, so we like the guy. Get him back in. Get the rizz-less guy back in charge.

There have been a couple of different periods of time over the last year or so when there have been protests in Iran, and they haven’t really amounted to much. This time seems to be a little bit different. It’s no coincidence that this operation happened at the same time that these events are going on in Iran, because what it really does is pour fuel on the fire and freaks out the Ayatollah a ton.

I do want to make clear that the geopolitical situation in Iran is very different from the geopolitical situation in Venezuela. The Ayatollah is 86. He doesn’t really do much day to day anyway. The Islamic regime is an entrenched political apparatus.

While that’s true in Venezuela, Maduro is a little bit more of an actual leader than the Ayatollah is. The Ayatollah is more of a figurehead. To actually take down the Iranian regime would require a true rising up of the people. Mossad helping out on the streets can’t hurt, but it would require a true rising up of the people.

Now, if that happened—if you see any inkling of that going down—I think you’re buying a ton of gold and a ton of BTC, because when the geopolitical winds shift, non-sovereign currencies tend to do well. General risk goes up, because if you take down Iran and you take down Venezuela, everything that you said about China becomes existential, right?

It becomes existential for China. If they no longer have access to all the oil that they need, what do they do? How do they act? Have you backed them into a wall and made them quiet down, or do they get belligerent and angry?

10. Regime Change Implications

They do have access to all the oil they need. I’ll just add a quick asterisk: They would have access to all the oil they need; they just wouldn’t have exclusive access to it. If they did something horrendous, like started a war in Taiwan that messed up everybody’s supply chain, then they wouldn’t have access to the oil they need.

Yes, I agree with you. That was to clarify what happens when their oil is controlled by theoretical adversaries as opposed to allies, right? That’s really what it is at the end of the day.

It’s kind of like the same way that Germany was laughing at Trump when he said, “Hey, you can’t rely too much on Russian oil,” because they weren’t aware enough that maybe Russia could actually turn into an adversary one day. They just didn’t even believe it. And now, you fast-forward—I think that was 2018—you fast-forward 4 years, and suddenly they’re in big trouble. There was an energy crisis that winter because—

Because they were scrambling to cover their needs. They were saying, “Oh, wait, shit, we can’t use Russian oil anymore.”

I think China very much knows that if oil is controlled by the West, they’re getting that spigot turned off immediately. So I think that’s a big thing.

To me, what this says is that all of my investments in my book right now are concentrated solely around very, very, very liquid assets, because I think the world is changing extremely quickly and you don’t really want to be sitting in assets that you can’t offload particularly easily. I actually think real estate is tough right now. If you’re in VC or PE, I think that can be very tough. I think PE is in for a bloodbath personally.

Me too. Just an absolute bloodbath, because the world is changing very quickly. The liquid markets are making people a lot of fucking money, so people are going to want to come back into these markets and trade them.

Emerging markets, for the first time, are trading extremely well. They actually outperformed the S&P this year. In aggregate, I’m just very, very, very bullish looking forward to next year.

I think this is going to be an opportunity to make a ton of money. There is a generational wealth opportunity for those brave enough. That’s a tweet.

Yeah, I just shared your tweet. So I have 2 questions for you. If Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson were an Islamic Persian guy, how soon would the regime have fallen? Would it have been 5 years ago?

Second question: What did you mean by this tweet? A lot of people are saying, “Give me the ticker.” Can you elaborate a little bit?

There are sort of 3 things here. Number 1, this was a little tongue-in-cheek based on a conversation that I had with my friend, who basically said, “Hey, I’m booking flights to Venezuela. I’m going to go down there and scope out Venezuelan real estate, and I’m going to try to…” He speaks Spanish pretty fluently.

He's from a Hispanic country, so he's like, “Hey, I'm just going to go down there and try to see if I can open up markets.”

I think that's kind of what's happening, right? There are 3 main opportunities here. Study what happened in the ’90s when the Soviet Union collapsed; study what happened when Yugoslavia collapsed; study what happened when basically any current regime starts to melt and we in the West gain access to those markets.

If you have a little bit of gumption and channel your inner 19th-century British explorer, the Iranian regime falls—go learn some Farsi. If you're 22 years old, maybe you want to go to Iran. I'm not even kidding.

Maybe you want to go to Venezuela. The moment the war in Russia ends and Vitol starts investing billions of dollars into Russia, if you speak any Russian, that's going to be a great opportunity for you. This was a little tongue-in-cheek, but also kind of a serious statement: there is an edge to be had here if you're young, if you don't have any ties, and you go try to figure out—get the lay of the land—in countries where the political landscape is shifting.

Try to figure out: can you start an import-export business into Russia? Can you start an import-export business into—

I have an anecdote for you. Are there things that maybe you want to go sell to the Venezuelans, potentially? There's a lot out there that they don't have that my Vitol buddies might actually want.

People who were earning very modest base salaries and de minimis bonuses, working in the Moscow office at Vitol, as well as some of the peripheral—we call them the “-stans”—a couple of the young guys from those groups, after the Ukraine war kicked off, with the relationships—like, the number-two guy on the origination book in various—we call it FSU, former Soviet Union—they left to form their own independent bucket-shop brokerages to get Russian oil laundered into the Western Hemisphere's refining system.

Tell me exactly what they did. How did they go from being minimum-wage workers at Vitol to becoming billionaires?

They did. They weren't minimum-wage workers at Vitol. They were corporate-functionary-level income earners at an international oil company, and they did things that Vitol's legal department wouldn't have approved.

They were nimble and startup-y, and they had the relationships on both the supply side and the demand side. Basically, what you need if you want to go into an economy that's just changed massively, either closed off or opened up, is what we in the commodities world call the armpits. You have 2 armpits, right? You need to have both the supply side and some demand kind of captured under your arms. You need to have both sides of the trade.

It helps to have cheap supply. To your point earlier in the podcast about crypto trading, entry price is everything. In this case, these guys were getting cheap supply from Russia because likely Urals Russian oil was trading at, instead of its normal price of Brent plus $1, like Brent minus $38. So they had that, right?

They could probably sell it—turn it into some other kind of oil via mixing it. They probably knew somebody with a storage tank somewhere random. And then you don't need to know the chief downstream, or refining, officer of ExxonMobil to sell that oil. You just need to know somebody who knows him, which is like 1,000 people.

You leave the last few percentage points of profit to your offtake guy, and that guy captures a few riskless points selling it to Exxon, BP, Shell, or whoever. Basically, you need the cheap supply, you need the entry price, and then your exit price can just be—you have a commodity that people want. So then the exit price is like, you just need access to liquidity for that.

It's much harder to go the opposite way, to buy from a general pool of liquidity and then sell at some dumb price to an unknowing buyer. That's a much less defensible business model, because eventually the buyer wises up and stops overpaying. But with cheap supply, you're solving a problem for them, right?

And to quote the famous Marc Rich—I would say he's the best trader of all time, the father of modern oil trading—he said, “The only objective standard is the law.” Right? So if these guys were in Monaco's jurisdiction or Pakistan, or wherever the hell they set up shop, if they weren't breaking the law, they were doing something that Vitol couldn't do and that JPMorgan couldn't do. Fine—the market needed that.

Correct. I was actually thinking of the book The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich when I wrote that tweet.

Yeah. I was thinking, if you're willing to be a little bit daring and entrepreneurial, you can find some of these opportunities. It's a lot easier, obviously, if you're already embedded in the system, but you don't necessarily have to be in order to figure it out.

It helps to be a little embedded before you go in. It helps to be embedded. You need the supply.

That's where you start, right? That's what I'm trying to explain. If you're sitting here with nothing right now, figure out how to get embedded. Call up Jonah.

I have a few ideas. I'm hustling. I've got some side hustles going right now along those lines. I think the geopolitical map is going to get rewritten drastically. It matters for crypto. It matters for any commodity.

I think, basically, the way Iran falls—I think Iran's next. I don't fully understand why they're having protests now. I would be eager to get your take, but I think what it basically—

Well, the take is very simple. It's a coordinated effort right now by the CIA and Mossad to get this thing done.

Yeah.

And it's the right time. We've been pushing—I say “we”; they have been pushing this for a long time.

We Americans—yeah, we Americans have been pushing it.

I think the reason why it matters is the timing. I do want to say it's definitely not 100% that it's going to happen. But there are a lot of signs that there are operations potentially going on right now that have not happened in the last 10 to 15 years, and that would lead to a regime change.

Okay. So basically, why this one matters for oil and Bitcoin: Iran is not like Venezuela. Iran's more like Saudi Arabia. You stick a toothpick in the ground, the oil comes out. So you could bring on, I would guess, another 1–2 million barrels a day pretty quickly if it became a Western-aligned nation. So that would indeed be bearish for oil.

The other thing is that it would align with market prices instead of getting sold to China at discounted prices. Another thing is the NITC, the National Iranian Tanker Company, which has basically an armada of tankers floating full of oil at sea that can't be sold at all. They're all full. That would all just get dumped on the market.

If you get a Maduro-style Delta Force raid again—Chuck Norris, man, I love that shit—if that were to happen, then yes, oil goes down the moment that it's released. And the other thing is, the Ayatollah—even if he's not involved day to day—he is the only respectable figurehead who can keep that country together.

His son and the other random runner-ups for Ayatollah number 3 are not going to cut it. They don't have the respect. There are too many factions. Only likely Ali Khamenei can keep the thing together. So even if he's not doing anything, his existence in the country—if he flees to Moscow, the country just becomes a—I wouldn't even say a client state of the West. I would say—

It would take a lot more. It would take, obviously, the installation of likely Reza Pahlavi in charge.

11. Betting On Mega Trends

It would take the dismantling—the dismantling of the entire apparatus. I mean, think about it: there are tens of thousands of people in this government, and they clearly have a succession plan. They also have a president outside of the Ayatollah who does run the country.

But all in, I think we agree on the statement that there are a lot of really interesting things that you can do. There's also a secondary point here that I wanted to talk about, which is that, for the first time since COVID, I've felt that the government and the way that the world is heading are comprised of these megatrends that you can't really fight, which makes it a lot safer to make big bets, in my personal opinion.

For example, NATO countries, by the end of 2035, are all saying together, “We must hit 5% of GDP when it comes to defense spending.” The U.S. is at 3.4%. Every other European country is below that. And so you just know for a fact that there's going to be increased defense spending.

I don’t necessarily think this has worked its way into prices yet. Nor has it been noted that there are a lot of defense startups in the United States. Maybe you want to start investing in defense tech companies.

The whole reason Palmer Luckey started this bank called what was likely Erebor, which presumably is a crypto bank, is that he’s now lending to defense tech startups. That’s what he wants to do with Erebor because he sees that there’s a lot of money that’s going to come from the government into defense tech over the next 5 to 10 years.

Are you going to take advantage of that? How are you going to make sure that you’re positioned to make as much money as possible based off these mega trends—based off the mega trends of AI, based off the mega trends of the debasement of our currencies, based off fractured geopolitics? As much as I hate Ian Bremmer, he has one thing that he’s right about: We are in a G-Zero world, or I guess maybe G-1 if you want to put the United States on top.

Every country is out for its own interests, and by necessity, we’re going to have increased defense spending. We’re going to be really focused here. Obviously, I think that right now we’re in a world where there are all these intractable and unbeatable mega trends, and you can really latch onto them and take advantage of them and make yourself money.

The reality is that the vast majority of people on this planet are not going to do that. They’re not going to know. A, they’re not going to notice the trends. B, hell, I can tell you, they’re not going to bet on the trends. If you can be somebody that notices and bets on these trends, this is really the first time since COVID that I’ve seen things this clearly, right?

In COVID, it was, “We’re going to print money. We’re going to print as much money as it possibly takes us to get out of this.” I don’t even want to call it a mega trend. That was an action that we knew the government was going to take.

12. Final Thoughts

I highly encourage everybody to pick up the book The Fourth Turning because I think it outlines the period of time that we’re going through very well. We’re entering into a period of geopolitical upheaval where you can’t really escape what’s going to happen, and so you just have to make sure that you’re on the right side. That’s my take. That’s why I put out that tweet.

I feel like this is actually probably a good place to end it.

Yeah, very good place to end it.

Keep your eyes open, make some money, and stay tuned. Love it, Avi. Great talking with you as always. Own Bitcoin, be creative, and stay liquid.

Stay liquid. Talk to you later, Jonah.