Markets Soar After Iran Ceasefire & Bitcoin Creator Revealed?

0:00Neal Freyman:There's more to investing than stocks and bonds. With iBit, you can broaden your investment mix and get Bitcoin exposure. Learn more about iBit with iShares by BlackRock. The market is yours.

0:16Good morning, Brute Daily Show. I'm Neal Freyman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, will the real Satoshi Nakamoto please stand up?

0:23Neal Freyman:Ben, America's homes are as old as they've ever been. It's Thursday, April 9th. Let's ride.

0:33Good morning. So we just got escalator mogged by China. In Wushan County, it recently opened the longest outdoor escalator system in the world. It spans 3 ,000 feet, comprised of 21 individual escalators, eight elevators, four moving walkways, and several pedestrian bridges. If you want to walk from the bottom to the top, you will ascend 800 feet, the equivalent of an 80-story skyscraper, and it takes 21 minutes in total to complete. So pretty ideal for an MBD episode. Toby, I know you'd try to sprint up this thing.

1:03Neal Freyman:I'm still taking the stairs, Neil. Actually, I'm not taking the escalator. What the heck? I actually love this escalator lore because I started diving deep into what the shortest escalator is. And that is in a mall in Japan with a vertical height of just 32 inches. What does that even entail? Is there a moving stair? That is quite literally just under - Less than three feet. Yeah, less than three feet. And then also I looked up the world record for the person who has walked the most escalator stairs in reverse, which we've all thought about before. And that is Guido Kunze. He said it in Germany, 61 ,100 escalator stairs.

1:40Neal Freyman:So now I'm thinking this escalator in China, it's called the goddess escalator. How long would that take to walk in reverse? So mine went a lot of different places. I wouldn't say it's escalator mogdo because it's multiple ones strung together. So I feel like they're kind of cobbling together the world record here, but pretty cool. I highly recommend looking up pictures of it. And now a word from our sponsor, TaxAct. Neil, pass me the rusty old saxophone because I've got the tax season blues. You don't play saxophone. Then how do I cure my blues if not with the power of jazz? Try TaxAct. They help small business owners get their taxes done.

2:16TaxAct makes filing easy for small businesses by providing the only online DIY filing software for small businesses.

2:22Neal Freyman:With Tax Act, you can file your business taxes any way you'd like. You can do them by yourself with step-by-step guidance. You can file with help from a credentialed tax expert when you have questions, or you can upload your documents and an expert will prepare and file for you. Just head to taxact.com slash business dash returns to get started. That's taxact.com slash business dash returns. The U.S.-Iran ceasefire looks as fragile as a Jenga tower with two bottom bricks missing, But at least on Wall Street, they were celebrating like the war is on the way out. Stocks popped off yesterday after President Trump said on Tuesday that he would postpone attacks on Iran's infrastructure and later agreed to a pause in hostilities with Tehran.

3:01The Dow gained 1 ,300 points, its best day since April 2025, while the S &P rose 2.5 percent and the Nasdaq 2.8 percent. Oil prices, which have surged since the war began five weeks ago, plunged 16 percent in their biggest one day drop since the pandemic. Diesel and natural gas prices also fell on the hopes that ships would once again traverse the Strait of Hormuz and clear up a bottleneck that's delivered the biggest oil shock the world has ever seen. Here's the but. The Strait doesn't appear to be open because in the aftermath of the ceasefire, Iran has only tightened its grip on the key waterway.

3:32According to S &P Global Market Intelligence, just four ships were allowed to pass through on Wednesday, compared to 100 to 120 before the war. Meanwhile, Iran said it closed the Strait again after accusing the U.S. of violating the ceasefire agreement. To sum it up, it doesn't look at all like the status quo has changed, with Iran only approving a select few ships to transit the strait and is collecting tolls of up to$2 million per vessel in crypto or Chinese yuan. So while Wall Street is celebrating the economic impact of the war, inflation, a global supply crunch for key raw materials, looks to continue for the foreseeable future, there's relief but massive question marks about what lies ahead.

4:07Neal Freyman:And the people asking those questions are oil executives because they kind of called up the White House and go, wait a second. We didn't have to do any of this stuff before the war broke out. Now we have to pay a toll. We're going to have to pass on those costs to consumers. The big thing that they keep saying is it's precedent risk because now if Iran has control of the Strait of Hormuz, what does that mean for other places around the world? Like the Strait of Malacca, the Bosporus Strait, like other choke points that are naturally occurring. But now that Iran has kind of seized control of this one, do other countries try the same thing?

4:41Neal Freyman:But everyone just keeps going back to six weeks ago, we didn't have to do any of this. Ships were moving through the strait freely, hundreds of ships every single day. Now we're celebrating if five make it through. It just doesn't seem like the war had the intended effect. We're also hearing from shipping companies. Maersk, which is the second biggest in the world, kind of talked about the pathway for shipping in the future, said the ceasefire may create transit opportunities. but it does not yet provide full maritime certainty and we need to understand all potential conditions attached. And then you have Hatbag Lloyd out of Germany.

5:13Another huge container ship company said it's going to continue to avoid Hormuz for now, but added that the ceasefire was a positive development.

5:20Neal Freyman:I liked what Nippon Yusen said, a big shipping company out of Japan said, it was monitoring the situation. They're just like us. Yeah, but the big takeaway is that the economic fallout from this is just beginning. One, because people are treating this like a permanent ceasefire. It's not like this is still temporary. There's still enough time for the status quo to change once again. But everyone just keeps saying that you can't bring on infrastructure flipping a switch. You know, a lot of these places have been damaged. You can't just say production needs to get back up to, you know, the pre-war time.

5:54Neal Freyman:So that's the general outlook is that this snarl is going to take a long time to uncombe. The global economy is not just something that you can kind of run your hands through and then like it's flowing again. It takes a while to get that snarl out. And then we're also seeing companies starting to report earnings. And they'll obviously talk about the impact of the war. Delta Airlines, the biggest U.S. airline, reported yesterday and said that we are going to have to pay$2 billion more in higher fuel costs through June because of the war. and the spike in oil prices. So we're probably going to hear from a lot more companies coming over the next weeks and months talking about the impact of the war and showing that the economic consequences are not going to be confined to the five weeks that the war was happening, but it's going to be lasting months in the future.

6:39Neal Freyman:Moving on, for 16 years, the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, who's sitting on 1.1 million of the biggest crypto on earth, has been one of the great unsolved mysteries of the modern age. But the New York Times reporter John Carreau thinks he's cracked it. After an eight-month-long investigation, Carreau thinks it's Adam Back, a 55-year-old British cryptographer. The main evidence Carreau puts forward is a series of posts between 1997 and 1999 that lay out every core feature of Bitcoin, from built-in scarcity to publicly verifiable protocol. To tie the writing to Back, Cariou used forensic linguistics, running 34 ,000 of the posts through writing quirk filters to narrow down a pool of 620 candidates to just one Adam Back.

7:27Neal Freyman:Cariou confronted Back at a crypto forum asking him to explain other so-called coincidences like why he conveniently went silent on cryptography forums the entire time Satoshi was active, or why he refused to hand over the metadata on emails that would clear his name. Back offered up no real explanations. The final smoking gun Karyu puts forth is that Back is about to become CEO of a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company, which means if he is Satoshi, the billions in Bitcoin controlled by Satoshi's wallet becomes a legally material disclosure he's required to tell shareholders about. It all sounds pretty compelling, except for one small wrinkle.

8:03Neal Freyman:Back himself was quick to shut it all down. He called the case confirmation bias, saying similarities in writing and timing are just that coincidences. Neil, is Satoshi British? Possibly. Here's the thing. Adam Back has this is not the first time that he's been accused or identified as Satoshi. So he's very good at denying it. And the person who is Satoshi probably does not want people to know because their paper wealth, because they have one point one million Bitcoin is they're going to be worth seventy eight billion dollars. So this is going to be one of the richest people in the world. It's not something something that you want to maybe brag about and all of a sudden put a target on your back.

8:38And speaking of back, Adam Back said a couple of years ago, no one knows who Satoshi is, and that's a good thing. So even if he is, he's probably going to deny it.

8:48Neal Freyman:A lot of this evidence came from, one, this kind of roadmap that Back laid out for Bitcoin back in 1997. Back wrote on forums that he wants Bitcoin's core principles to be privacy distributed across a computer network built in scarcity to prevent inflation, no trust required in any individual or bank. And then it's insane. But two days later, he added a fifth, a publicly verifiable protocol. All of that eventually made it into Bitcoin's white paper. So he had kind of the technical know-how or at least the philosophical alignment with what Bitcoin eventually became. So that's one thing is that like back had the roadmap.

9:26Neal Freyman:He wrote it himself. And then there is this sort of forensic linguistics where they're tying a lot. Everyone has idiosyncrasies in the way that they write, in the way that they punctuate things. And so that's what Karyu did. He went back and found that both back and Satoshi used two spaces between sentences, weird stuff like that. They often punctuated its incorrectly, which is something I also do. Do you put the apostrophe or not? I might be Satoshi. And then there's just like small little things where they hyphenate some words, where they use adjectives in certain ways, where they use Czech, the British spelling and not the American spelling.

10:03Neal Freyman:They use both the British and American spelling of optimized. So these all leave basically a fingerprint in your writing. And so that's where Carrie is like, your fingerprint matches Satoshi's writing very, very closely. Let's be clear. There is no smoking gun here. It's all circumstantial evidence. And Back says this is also just a coincidence. So it's not that strong of a denial either. But John Carrie has a lot of cred. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice. He is the man known for exposing Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes for the fraud it was. And that probably wouldn't have happened if he hadn't gone snooping.

10:37So in terms of doing corporate detective work, I mean, he's 1A. So, you know, maybe that lends a little bit more credence. He spent 18 months searching for Satoshi. At this point, the question is, does it really matter who Satoshi is? A lot of people in the Bitcoin community say, we don't actually want to know. We're moving on by this point. It really doesn't matter who he is or they are and we don't actually want to know because it's not really material to Bitcoin unless he starts selling that$1.1 million Bitcoin. Then the entire market falls out from beneath them. But I always find mysteries interesting and we'll see whether –

11:13Neal Freyman:It was an enjoyable read. I really do enjoy the forensic linguistics because I wonder if my footprint is just so easily identifiable. I feel like I'm probably like there are certain things that you just misspell. So just from a pure interest level, I recommend reading the piece. Moving on, America's next top model might be from Meta. Meta, along the laggard of the AI race, got its act together, unveiling Muse Spark yesterday, its first major release since spending a boatload of money building out its super intelligence unit. Muse Spark isn't racing to the very top of the LLM pecking order, but it's certainly in the mix.

11:50Neal Freyman:It lags in coding ability but can keep up on most reasoning issues and excels at multimodal functions that combine voice, text, and images. Shiel Monat, a VC on X, posted that in his limited time tinkering with the model, he tested it using his last several Claude queries and liked Meta's answers better. Anecdotal but clearly a step up from its last publicly launched open source model, Llama 4, which was a big disappointment and prompted Duck to make a strategy change. Muse Spark, in addition to being led by AI Wonder Kid and Scale AI founder Alexander Wang, is the first closed source model Meta has released.

12:25Neal Freyman:Spark will be put right into primetime powering AI features on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other functions across Meta's business in the coming weeks. In typical Meta fashion, Spark comes with a shopping mode, too, that will help you buy clothes or decorate a room. Neil, it looks like the market liked what it saw. Meta stock jumped 9 % when the model was released. Relieved that the company's$100 billion build-out of AI infrastructure won't be without something to show for it. It's been quite a few days for model drops. If Anthropics Mythos was the Batmobile, this one is maybe more the Honda Civic.

12:58It's not going to wow you, but it's efficient, dependable, and gets you from point A to point B, which is a good thing for Meta, which has stumbled a lot in its AI build-out or its AI models, like consumer-facing models. It is getting lapped right now by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and now it has a little something to show for its massive investments in human capital and in CapEx and actual data centers for AI.

13:22Neal Freyman:I think the big emotion felt by Meta investors was just relief that all of this spending is not for nothing. Wired put out a headline about this model drop saying Meta's new AI model gives Mark Zuckerberg a seat at the big kids table. Again, he's not pushing the forefront of these large language models. They're not the leading frontier model, but at least it's competitive with a lot of the good models out there. I mean, remember, if you're competitive with Opus, which is Claude's top model before Mythos was released, that's a good model. People really enjoy using Claude. It's very effective. It is fascinating, though, that they didn't prioritize coding as much because that's been maybe the core use case of a lot of these other ones.

14:03Neal Freyman:It went more to the multimodal side, which I guess makes sense for Meta because it is a social media company. So fascinating little split from kind of the consensus. I also think AI companies are getting a little bit better at naming models. Remember a few years ago, it was like GPT-405Z. And now we're getting some better names, some better naming conventions. I think they're learning things like we got Mythos, Sonnet, and Opus from Anthropic. I mean, those are gorgeous to say. Gemini is pretty fun. OpenAI even has Codex, which I like. And now we got MuseSpark from Meta. I mean, I think we're getting better.

14:34I know, but we were just talking before the show that it's either Muse or Spark.

14:38Neal Freyman:Why did you need to combine Muse and Spark? What are people going to actually call that? I ended up calling it MetaSpark, so maybe there's still a ways to go. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Neal's Numbers right after this. Toby, you ever found a big problem with a teeny tiny solution? Yeah, locked doors. Okay, fair. But what if I told you I found the key to losing and keeping weight off? It's going micro with Noom. Micro habits, micro wins, and micro doses of GLP-1s. In fact, Noom found users lose on average 8 pounds in 30 days on their micro dose protocol. The Noom GLP-1 micro dose program starts at$79 and is delivered to your door in 7 days.

15:21Start your micro dose GLP-1 journey today at Noom.com. That's N-O-O-M dot com. Noom micro changes big results. See podcast description for full disclaimers. Toby, how do you wake up in the morning?

15:33Neal Freyman:Well, I asked our producer to slap me across the face as hard as they can or drink coffee. Have you considered ultra pouches? They're completely nicotine free and caffeine free, but help you feel human in the morning with clinically proven nootropics and adaptogens to deliver immediate focus and smooth energy that lasts one to two hours. And with flavors like cool mint, wintergreen, tropical and watermelon, it's hard to pick a favorite. Get some for yourself at TakeUltra.com. That's takeultra.com. Neil, you like slashing? I don't understand the question, and I won't respond to it. And you'll love Vanguard because they're slashing fees again, this time for more than 50 of its funds.

16:14Neal Freyman:That's on top of big fee cuts they gave last year to investors. This is for the financial advisors out there whose job is to help their clients keep more of what they earn. Go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash impact. That's Vanguard.com slash impact. All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor. Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will make you feel like you're in a cartoon and a light bulb just popped up above your head. For my first number, San Francisco is so back. And by back, I mean, it's once again, way too expensive to live there.

16:47The median house price in San Francisco spiked to 2.15 million in March, up 18 % from a year earlier, according to Compass. condo prices are also skyrocketing, increasing 27 % from last March to 1.36 million. Compare that to the broader US housing market where prices inch just 0.8 % higher in the year through March. AI is fueling a new gold rush. And like in 1849, it's centered in San Francisco where industry giants like OpenAI, Anthropic and dozens of other startups have set up shop. And it's putting a lot of strain on a real estate market where demand is fast outpacing supply. Home listings in SF plunged 28 % compared to a year earlier while properties are selling for 23 % above the asking price.

17:27I've seen videos online of open houses for just a standard SF apartment, and it's more packed than the L train at rush hour. Toby, not too long ago, San Francisco was declared dead due to rising crime, vacant storefronts, and remote work. That turned out to be wrong.

17:40Neal Freyman:Yeah, there's this joke online that every time Anthropic or OpenAI raises a new round, people screenshot an unassuming house that's selling for like$2.6 million and going, Look at all the money that's about to be flooding into this market. So it really does go as the kind of AI market goes at this point. The high end of the housing market in San Francisco is doing very well. At least 22 houses sold for more than$5 million in March. 24 condos that topped$3 million sold in March as well. So that is all-time highs for some of these monthly figures that we're seeing. You mentioned the crime turnaround.

18:19Neal Freyman:I think you can't overstate that either. It is a model now on how to fight crime. If you go back to a few years ago, they were averaging 86 break-ins per day. Now that's down to 15 break-ins today. So a lot of kind of the doom and gloom that surrounded the city has been completely turned around from crime to the housing. Well, the housing market is rough depending on which side of it that you're on, but clearly the doom loop did not come to pass. And those are car break-ins per day. Just want to clarify. Yeah. And just get, wait for these companies to IPO. I mean, there's going to be so much more money even flooding into the real estate market because opening i anthropic and some other silicon valley companies are about to go public later this year and they're gonna be a lot of really rich employees okay my next number might explain the ghost in your attic homes in america are old like really old the age of the median house has increased to a record 44 years according to the harvard joint center for housing studies and those creaky floorboards and leaky roofs need constant repairs maintenance projects whose rising costs are far outpacing broader inflation.

19:19As the Wall Street Journal reports, the cost of structural repairs in real terms, that means adjusted for inflation, jumped by about 14.1 % between 2022 and 2024, while plumbing climbed even more, 23.6%. Labor is getting more expensive. The individual parts are as well, not to mention property taxes, homeowners, association dues, and insurance. When you buy an older home, the mortgage itself is just the start of your endless money pit journey. The conventional wisdom is to set aside 1 % of the home's value for upkeep each year. But as the country's housing stock ages and breaks down, that's outdated.

19:522 % to 3 % is far more realistic, according to Angie Hicks, co-founder of the home services company Angie. Toby, I'll tell you what. It is a rough time to be a homeowner. It is a great time to be Home Depot, a general contractor, or a plumber.