This is Macro Voices, the free weekly financial podcast targeting professional finance, high net worth individuals, family offices, and other sophisticated investors.

Macrovoices is all about the brightest minds in the world of finance

and macroeconomics telling it like it is, bullish or bearish, no holds barred. Now, here are

your hosts, Eric Townsend and Patrick Suresna. Macrovoices episode 526 was produced on April 2nd, 2026. I'm Eric Townsend. We've got another macrovoices doubleheader lined up for you, and it's going to be a doozy. President Trump gave an address Wednesday night that surprised the markets, so I'm recording earlier than usual this week on Wednesday night about an hour after President Trump's speech

in which he said that if no deal can be reached, the U.S. plans include targeting all of Iran's

civilian electric power generation plants, probably simultaneously. That's exactly the red line

that Iran has previously said would cause it to retaliate

by targeting desalination plants and the UAE's Baraka nuclear power station. Now, we know the

president's negotiating style is to make dire threats and then walk them back once a deal is reached.

So hopefully the threat of targeting civilian power generation is, to make dire threats and then walk them back once a deal is reached.

So hopefully the threat of targeting civilian power generation infrastructure will come off the table soon.

But overall, my take is that this conflict is heating up, not cooling down as the market was

interpreting before President Trump's Wednesday evening speech.

And the president was clear in that speech in saying that the U.S. would be hitting Iran

very hard over the next two weeks if no deal is reached.

We're going to kick things off with an exceptional performance by freelancer.com CEO, Matt Berry, who returns as this

week's feature interview guest for a full interview on the latest developments on artificial

intelligence, what they mean for private credit markets, why the AI business model is setting

the stage for an eventual market dislocation on the scale of the 2000.com bust,

why pay per token inference pricing is inevitable and why it will collapse the current AI business

model and much more. Then for this week's Iran conflict update, Energy Outlook Advisors founder and managing partner Dr. Anas

Al-Haji returns as this week's second feature interview guest, and it's going to run just

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