The Strait "Reopens" and Gold Keeps Climbing

In today's episode: Good news broke this morning: the Strait of Hormuz is officially open again — assuming you believe what you read in the papers, which Doug emphatically does not. Oil dropped toward $80, gold crept toward $5,000 (a combination Doug calls "a little bit counterintuitive"), and meanwhile C-130s keep flowing into the Middle Eastern theater around the clock. As Doug puts it, "chances are this is just a pause in hostilities — everybody's taking the opportunity to reload."

From there the conversation goes exactly where you'd hope it would.

We get into Pete Hegseth's now-infamous "prayer breakfast," where the Secretary of Defense appears to have lifted Samuel L. Jackson's Ezekiel 25:17 monologue from Pulp Fiction and delivered it to a room of bewildered military brass as scripture. Doug's review was not kind: "It was kind of weak and mealy-mouthed the way Hegseth delivered those lines." His proposed fix? "Next time he ought to put a red bandana around his forehead à la Rambo, strip his shirt off to expose his war-like tattoos, and then deliver it with proper fervor."

Elsewhere in a wide-ranging episode:

• Why coin collecting is dead and what that says about how we think about money

• Doug's characteristically diplomatic take on Ireland's troubles

• The Argentine citizenship-by-investment program that was, then wasn't

• Whether traveling as an American is about to get uncomfortable again (Doug remembers the Vietnam-era Canadian-flag-on-the-backpack trick)

• Human cloning, Multiplicity, and the curious case of Adolfo Cambiasso cloning his best polo ponies — which rather settles the question of whether someone, somewhere, has tried it on people

• An honest look at our private placement track record: the big winners, and the ones that aren't

As Doug reminds us near the end: "We're just leaves drifting down the river of time. We shouldn't concern ourselves with these things — they're above our pay grade anyway."

Have a great weekend,

Matt