Oil Expert: We Can’t Predict Iran Anymore

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It's built for humans and agents, with the guardrails of human software and the scale of agentic infrastructure. This is the frontier of go-to-market. Teams like Parallel, Turbo Puffer, and Wordsmith are already using Atio to set the pace. Now it's your turn. Try Atio for free by going to Atio.com slash Vox. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash Vox. Atio.com slash Vox. Welcome to Profiteer Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is September 23rd. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The Nasdaq climbed to another record high, boosted by a rally in chip stocks. Meanwhile, the S&P was flat, while the Dow declined. Brent crude was volatile. More on that in a second. And finally, the yield on 10-year treasuries was flat for the day. Okay, what's happening? Oil tumbled to its lowest point in two weeks yesterday morning, but by midday, those gains were mostly erased. Early on Tuesday, Brent crude had fallen 3% to around $97. That was on hopes that Saudi Arabia's crucial East-West pipeline would restart this week, and that there might be diplomatic progress at the United Nations General Assembly. But just a few hours later, hopes sank, and oil prices climbed back above $100 following President Trump's speech at the UN. He said that he had a big decision to make about whether to strike a deal with Iran or to, quote, annihilate it. He also said that a deal might be made after the midterms. Then, during a meeting in the afternoon, Trump claimed that his team just concluded a, quote, very good meeting with Iran's representatives. Brent crude settled the day at $98 a barrel. So, lots to unpack in the world of oil. Today, we're speaking with Matt Smith, Director of Commodity Research at Kepler. Matt, great to see you again. I was going to begin with a question about what is going on in the world of oil. And I think that's the thing. We came into Tuesday, and there was the bearish influence of both Trump talking about sort of tentative diplomacy. And you had the same signaling from Iran as well. And so, you don't know if they're both playing games or what, right? Yeah, I think Trump. Trump has come to terms with the fact that we're probably in a holding pattern and nothing's going to happen until after the midterm elections here. Iran, on the other hand, is perhaps chancing its luck and saying, yeah, sure, like we could open the strait in seven days. All you have to do is remove your blockade and unfreeze all our assets. And so, that's the path that we're faced with here. And so, after, you know, initial positivity and the move lower on that news, really, we're just back in a holding pattern. pattern here, Ed. And so, perhaps the Saudi stuff has more relevance in this case. Is there any evidence that the relationship with Iran or the progress towards some form of a deal or some sort of peace talks, that it's moved in any substantive direction? Like, I mean, he says that he's open to meeting with the president, but then he also suggests annihilating the nation. I don't know if that's more or worse, or is it just we have no idea? I think we have no idea, particularly, you know, when President Trump talks for so long every single day, he throws out so many things, right? Some of them are helpful and some of them are not. And so, I think, really, we have to look beyond these headlines and just assume that we're in a holding pattern here until after the midterms. J.P. Morgan, their commodities team, they put out some research. They officially abandoned their baseline forecast for oil markets. They said, quote, we simply don't know how to model the end game, which to me is quite striking. I also kind of respect it. They're basically just saying we don't even know. What does that say about the situation we're in? And what was your reaction to them sort of coming clean in that way? I think a lot of us could relate to that. We've all been feeling it at certain points over the last six and a half months here during the conflict. And so, you know, to have a base case is very difficult at this point. Even with ourselves, we revised our balances pretty strongly at the beginning of September here. Because even if we do get some kind of progress with the Strait of Hormuz, it's not going to be a straight path to normalcy. It's a very difficult thing to model here. You know, the concern really is that we do get escalation once the midterm elections are out of the way. And that escalation being, you know, whether it is Trump trying to define his legacy in terms of boots on the ground or whatever that may be. It's just very difficult to see how we see an end to this conflict here. The kicker to all of this really is that, as you mentioned, they're all prices around sort of $98 here. On the product side of things, we're seeing them absolutely ripping, you know, on a retail basis in the US. Diesel is at $6.50 a gallon. You know, that's up sort of 75% year on year. We're really starting to see that biting in terms of inflation, but in terms of everything, right, that those higher costs work their way into. But just in terms of the Strait of Hormuz, the ironic thing is that we've been seeing oil prices rising over the last month. Well, we've actually been seeing improving volumes coming out of the Strait as well. And so there's more barrels getting out. But I think it's the risk premium involved. That's what the issue is, is that while there's increased prices, there's also increased prices. And so I think that's increasing flows. There is an increasing chance that you're going to get hit by Iran there. And I think the main option that Iran has right to deter these flows or keep leverage over the Strait. And so I think on a certain level, we should expect them to be doing more of that going forward here. To me, if the price is reflecting a risk premium about just reflecting an anxiety that this war could flare up or could be sustained in some way, that sounds like a structural problem. That sounds like something that isn't going to change, as you say, even if oil flows increase through the Strait of Hormuz, which then makes me think this is not going away anytime soon. This is something that will sustain itself for a long time. And perhaps we will continue to see diesel prices at record highs, gas prices at close to record highs in America for quite a long time. Is that your assumption at this point? Well, just going back to what J.P. Moore said, right, when they said they just don't know how to model or plan for this endgame, whatever that may be. And that's the biggest challenge here, because there's either the potential that Trump just walks all of this back or walks away. The other is on the escalation side of things. And that could really turn out to a full blown boots on the ground war. And so both of those options don't seem attractive whatsoever right at this point. And so because even if Trump does walk away, that doesn't that's not the endgame. You've still got the Strait of Hormuz partially blocked or under control there. It doesn't resolve the situation. And so even if we get all of the situation resolved with the Strait of Hormuz over the next three months, it's going to take six months, nine months to resolve all the problems that we're seeing in the products markets. And then you have the U.S. talking about doing a diesel export ban, which would just like just end things absolutely crazy, right? Because when you think about global waterborne diesel exports, the U.S. accounts for about 20 percent of those And you've got Russia that has already banned its exports because Ukraine has just been relentlessly striking its refineries with drones there. Russia's about 10% of global exports, so they're already off the market. Middle East is about 10% of global exports as well for diesel. They're pretty much out of the market too because they're straightened. So you combine those three and say the US does an export ban, that's 40% of global diesel exports not actually coming to the market. What would be the downstream effects of that? I assume just inflation globally because of the amount of products that diesel is an input into. Is that the end game here? Exactly. You take diesel to the price where you cause massive demand destruction because there simply isn't enough barrels out there to meet the needs. And so you just drive those prices higher globally. Even from the US perspective, if you're going to put the diesel ban export in place, all that's going to do is cause refiners to dial back, take maintenance and that. It may have an influence, particularly in the US Gulf Coast, to reduce diesel prices where there's those 50% of US refining capacity is. But ultimately, it's just going to have all manner of different unintended consequences here. And yet at the same time, it feels like it's being seriously considered. You speak with oil traders and commodity traders. You are in the conversation. You are in the commodities world. And so you have access to the conversation that is closest to this conflict in a lot of ways. Just on sort of a social or maybe even a political level, how have feelings about this war changed among traders and among the commodities community? It seemed as though there was a time where a lot of traders weren't. They weren't too worried about this or they thought that this was something that they were kind of used to or that, you know, it shouldn't necessarily be priced in in a in a in a permanent way. Seems like maybe that's changing. But how have how have reactions in that community changed over the past several months? So the market keeps us humble. Right. And so we have seen certain markets being able to adapt to get the supplies that they need. And on the flip. Side, other things haven't happened that perhaps we expected. Like I've been on your show before, you know, March, April time, we're expecting prices on oil to be much, much higher than than where they actually went. And so there's that piece of it. But then the second piece of it is that markets fix themselves. Right. Economics drives everything. And you ultimately see, like we're talking about with diesel prices rise to the point where you kill demand. I think that the challenge right now is that it's very difficult, difficult to a fast. I think that the challenge right now is that it's very difficult to a fast. What is going to happen next and B, see how it is fixed over the short to medium term. And so there remains a lot of unknowns in this market here. And I think everybody is is is continuing to scratch their heads here. So while a lot of our clients are still very much focused on what is what is happening in the Strait of Hormuz, we have all manner of other situations that we're trying to figure out from from Chinese demand to Chinese rebound to Russian diesel export bans. All of this. Stuff and the complexity of it is only increasing, and that's not going to go away any time soon. Matt Smith is director of commodity research at Kepler. Matt, appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks, Ed. After the break, sports better. 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The New York Times reported on Saturday that DraftKings has built a machine learning model that scores customers on what it calls elasticity. The score predicts how much a customer will lose after getting a free bet or bonus. Customers who are expected to lose more will then get more offers. Reportedly, the company has also built a model to flag customers heading towards a gambling crisis, but it actually shelved that safeguard. The news lands in a bad year. For the stock, which is trading near a 52-week low, down more than 50% from its peak in 2025. Now facing increased competition from prediction markets, which captured roughly a quarter of U.S. sports betting volume during the World Cup. Investors are left wondering, where is the sports betting industry headed? Here to break this down, we are speaking with Jonathan Cohen, policy lead at the Institute for Boys and Men and author of Losing Big, America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. Jonathan, thanks for joining us. Good to see you. First, tell us a little bit about this New York Times report on DraftKings. It sounds like they are using AI to figure out who loses the most money and then get them to lose even more money. Is that what's going on? Yeah, and on the one hand, this is a crazy news story. And on the other hand, this is sort of business as usual for the sports gambling companies. You know, I don't think it would be a surprise to any industry observer that a gambling company knows who loses the most money. And. Targets them with promotions and tries to entice them to gamble more money. What what sort of new and special about this. And as you know, I listen to your podcast and you have to talk about AI these days and you put AI in the title of something and then the number goes up. And the New York Times sort of did a good job of sort of framing this, not just about, you know, the company targeting people, but using machine learning, using AI specifically to target people to do a better job than, you know, Vinny at the sports book, knowing which guy who walking into the casino deserves a promotion. And that, I think, scales. People because of how micro targeted, just how precise these algorithms can be relative to a human sort of making that same decision. I think the part that is maybe surprising or maybe not surprising, depending on your view of these companies, is this idea that they are actually targeting the people who are most vulnerable to gambling addictions. And a lot of the policy communication from these companies has been, no, we protect those people. We're just a platform. And if you have a gambling problem, if it's clear to us. that you are in danger, we will put some sort of safeguards in place to protect you, but they're not doing that. Is that commonplace in the industry? I would say this is something we've known actually for a long time, that modern online sports betting would afford us an amazing opportunity, right? Better data on gamblers than we ever would have been provided when people sort of walk into Vegas and cash tips or whatever. And then the question has sort of always been, okay, who gets that data, right? Does the VIP team, the people whose job it is to like ply big gamblers with free iPhones to keep them betting, or does what's called the responsible gambling team, the team whose job it is to monitor for problem gambling and to slow players down. And as the reporting makes clear, and this has sort of been consistent in the industry over the last eight years or so, that is in many companies, I think particularly at DraftKings, that is a very much a sidelined section of the company that it's their job is basically contrary. To the rest, the other 90% of the company, and DraftKings in particular, that has been a disempowered and almost disemboweled department. Just looking at the data, revenues on traditional online sports books, 11x from 2020 to 2025. It's gone from a one and a half billion dollar industry to a 17 billion dollar industry. That is just online sports betting. What is causing this rapid increase? And to what extent is it dependent as an industry on a handful of the most vulnerable gamblers? The number one driver is availability, right? Since the 2018 Supreme Court decision, 39 states and Washington, D.C. have legalized sports betting in some form, 32 of them providing it online. So whereas previously you had to like get on a plane and get your butt to Nevada, now you can bet on Malaysian Women's Doubles Badminton from the comfort of your home. Great. To your last point, it's a very. It's a very keen observation, right? Lots of industries rely on a small subset of customers, and gambling is no different. During the 2023-2024 NFL season, 82% of revenue for sports betting companies came from just 3% of customers. And those are the kinds of folks who we assume are going to be targeted through the program that The Times uncovered from DraftKings. Having said that, the stock has gotten hammered recently. It's down around 57%. FanDuel is also down 70% from last year. I assume this is a result of the fact that they are now competing with these other players in prediction markets, which are, of course, getting into online sports betting as well. What do you make of the fact that investors are starting to stay away from these companies? Yeah, I mean, I would say a lot of it is prediction markets. A lot of it is also just sort of natural maturation, right? These companies shot up to, I think, 80, 70, 80% of the market share immediately after legalization. And it was sort of inevitable that over time, they were going to be able to stay away from these companies. Specifically, a company like Fanatics would begin to chip away at the pole position that DraftKings and FanDuel had asserted for themselves. And then the prediction markets is really weird. You know, 69% of prediction market trading volume on sports is coming from folks in states without legalized sports gambling, 43% alone from Texas and California. But DraftKings is leaning really hard into prediction markets. FanDuel and Fanatics are launching prediction markets as well, but they clearly are not investing as much energy and as much advertising behind it. So you would think that the rise of CalSheet and PolyMarket wouldn't do as much damage as it is doing to a stock like DraftKings. But clearly, the market knows a lot better than me because, of course, it does. How bad of a problem is this? I mean, we can talk about these companies from an investment perspective, and they're printing money. And some people will say, OK, great, I'll invest. Maybe I'll get some outsized returns. But then, of course, there's the downside here. It seems like they are preying on vulnerable people, presumably vulnerable young men, who are probably lost and trying to figure out what to do with their lives. And they find this addictive substance called sports betting. I would imagine that it's been quite harmful to a lot of people. To what extent do we have evidence of that? To what extent is this a real problem? Yeah, so we have evidence specifically when it comes to sports betting, not prediction markets. And I'll spare your listeners an explanation. The methodology behind staggered difference in difference modeling. But basically, because different states legalize sports betting at different times, we can sort of see, OK, how does state X change, whereas state Y does not, because state X legalized sports gambling. And the results are pretty clear and pretty consistent. Following the arrival of sports betting, online sports betting specifically, we see a 10% increase in personal bankruptcies, a 6% to 8% increase in auto loan delinquencies, increase in child maltreatment cases, increases in food insecurity, and all sorts of other things. So these are some of the other super great trends that we love to encourage. And these are just at the aggregate level, right? This is just sort of at the statewide level. And again, only focused on sports betting, not to mention prediction markets, loot boxes, day trading apps, all sorts of other things that we think are sort of gambling and like gambling and causing harm like gambling, but are harder to track the exact results of. I want to ask you about Sydney Sweeney. I'm sure you were expecting this question. Oh, thank God. Finally, finally. Who got a lot of pushback recently for an ad that she was in, where she was basically half nude, uh, promoting this, this company, not half, not half, not half fully. Uh, a lot of people criticized her for sexualizing women's sports. This is what a lot of the criticism is based around. To me, the problem wasn't what she was or wasn't wearing. To me, the problem was what she was advertising for, which was another sports betting company. Um, and we are seeing a lot of this. A lot of celebrities are partnering with these gambling companies and advertising for these camps. I mean, Kevin Hart. Uh, with DraftKings, Jamie Foxx with BetMGM and now Sydney Sweeney. I mean, what do you make of this trend of a lot of celebrities, uh, advertising for sports betting companies? I mean, it feels a little reminiscent of crypto circa 2021, don't you think? Especially when it comes to prediction markets, which we can get into this whole conversation. The regulatory hammer might fall down, uh, next year. You're right. The Supreme Court might basically wipe these things out of existence come 2027, uh, specifically when it comes to sports. But can I have her? I'm going to give her a take on the, on the Sydney Sweeney ad, having seen it a few dozen times that I think is, is maybe relevant for you. So I think it's a brilliant, brilliant advertisement and a perfect distillation actually of this entire issue. The opening words of the ad, she walks up, she's naked. She turns to the camera and says, I think there's no better distillation of what young men are looking for from sports gambling than a naked Sydney Sweeney challenging them to make money from sports, right? Where else? What, what, what better encapsulation of young men's desire for mastery, for, for sexual standing for, for success in an economy where on the lower ends of the labor market, men are really, really struggling than a naked Sydney Sweeney telling them to prove that they can make money betting on sports. I think it's just a perfect, perfect, perfect encapsulation of this entire issue. Uh, and she's the only celebrity in many ways. You could pull that off. No offense to a naked Kevin Hart. I just don't think young men are as enticed by, by him challenging them. Uh, and she's the only celebrity in many ways you could pull that off. To, to, to make money, uh, on a prediction market platform. Well, I think this gets to, uh, one of the more important points, which is it does seem as though this is a men problem and you work at the Institute for Boys and Men. Um, what I can tell you is that nearly half of young men today have an online sports book account, uh, which is certainly higher than women. Um, to what extent is this related to being a man and to what extent is this related to being a man and to what extent is this related to being a man and to what extent is the betting industry dependent on specifically young male Americans? You sort of hunt where the ducks are, right? Uh, for lack of a better term and, and men are already sort of inclined toward not just gambling, but it's obviously also sports, right? And so you sort of put the confluence together, not to mention the fact that, as I said, young men sort of struggling in the labor market, struggling in higher education, uh, already prone to let's call it unwise decision-making, uh, in the case of young men, especially. Uh, and so you sort of put the confluence together, not to mention the fact that, as I said, young men sort of struggling in the labor market, struggling in higher education, uh, already prone to let's call it unwise decision-making, uh, in the case of young men, especially. And you can imagine how very quickly, even without a naked Sidney Sweeney challenging them to make money, they are sort of primed to be these companies' key customers. Uh, just before you go, what does the regulatory picture look like going forward and do you have any predictions for what we'll see in the coming years? Okay, so I would say we're, we're on the cusp of sort of two big trends, regulatorily. The first would be what I think is a rising sort of pushback to online sports betting in its, in its current form. And I think this would have happened a lot sooner and would be a lot further. Long had it not been for prediction markets that have really sort of sucked the air up of the, the sort of conversational vacuum around gambling. But I think that it really is starting. There are a couple of states that are, that are trying to rein things in and Colorado actually just passed a reform package last year. And then on the, on the, on the prediction market front, the wild west, the closing of the frontier is coming right one way or another. The Supreme court is, it looks like it is going to take up a case that is going to decide once and for all whether sports event contracts, which constitute roughly. 80% of prediction market trading volume, whether they violate state and travel gaming law. And if the court rules that they do, those contracts are done and prediction markets as we know them other than things like election and the Emmys are done. But that is, that is for, for, of course, for the court to decide. And, you know, these things nominate the case is about one thing, but actually it's about a whole other host of things. So I'm not, I'm not a lawyer, uh, much to my mother-in-law's chagrin. So I don't have, you know, I don't have a prediction about which way that's going to go, but even if the court doesn't do it, this is the kind of thing that Congress could do. Or if there's a change in the, in the power, uh, in the white house, the commodities future trading commission could do if they somehow had more than one. than one commissioner. So I think the writing is on the wall a little bit for prediction markets one way or another, whether it's through Congress, whether it's through the Supreme Court, or whether even through the court of public opinion, because lots of people are big mad about these things, and they might not be long for this world. Jonathan Cohen is policy leader at the Institute for Boys and Men and author of Losing Big, America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. Jonathan, always appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks, Ed. It's been more than two weeks since ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon tweeted that AI might kill us all, and the AI extinction debate rages on. Coxon's tweet has now received more than 170 million views. It has been endorsed by Anthropic's current head of alignment, who said the chances of human extinction are 10%. It was also endorsed by an open AI staffer, who said the chances are 70%. Sam Altman, the director of the Institute for Boys and Men and author of Losing Big, America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling, said the chances are 70%. It was also endorsed by an open AI staffer, Elon Musk has weighed in, Obama has weighed in, and of course, so has Donald Trump, who has called this whole thing a, quote, hoax. We have heard a lot of opinions, but what we haven't heard is a lot of facts. In fact, aside from the Hugging Face incident, which we knew about months ago, zero evidence of anything has been brought to the table. Yes, Coxon's tweet might have been scary and genuine, but he didn't actually tell us anything that we didn't already know. Meanwhile, the statement that there is a 10% probability of human extinction was not based on any actual data or even any calculation. It was just an opinion with a random number attached to it. And the number made it sound more statistically significant than it actually was. And the same is true of the take, about 70% probability of extinction. The same is true, by the way, of all of the accusations about this whole thing. being a hoax. Some say this was a setup by China to slow America's progress on AI. Others say it was all a setup by Anthropic to achieve regulatory capture ahead of their IPO. Does anyone have any evidence of any of these claims? No, they don't. Like the extinction claims, they are opinions. They might be interesting, but that doesn't mean that they're true. This is why the AI debate might be the dumbest conversation of the year. Because unlike productive conversations, which are grounded in data and in evidence, this conversation is grounded in almost nothing. It started with a guy's opinion, and the world piled on with more opinions. But similar to a Daily Mail tabloid, facts never really played much of a role. Now, that isn't to say that AI safety isn't an important topic. It is, and we have to take it seriously. But that means changing the way we have this conversation. It means focusing on evidence, and we have to take it seriously. And also accountability. Two things that have been sorely lacking from this debate. Without those, this will continue to be a dumpster fire of a conversation. And we will continue to run around in circles. It is time to make the AI conversation a little bit smarter. It's time we focus on the data, and we will continue to make the AI conversation a little bit smarter. It is time we continue to make the AI conversation a little bit smarter. It is time we focus on the data, and we will