On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly News Roundup 3/27/20 (Gold market, difficulty adjustments, deals and more) (EP.59)

Episode Date: March 27, 2020

Matt and Nic from Castle Island Ventures review the top stories of the week in the cryptoasset industry. This week's topics include:  - Deals of the Week - Dislocations in the gold markets - The effects of the -16% difficulty adjustments in BTC - Thoughts on the stimulus package - Quarantine reading suggestions and much more news of the week

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Concentive Easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And we're still remote. We're still in bunker down mentality. Yeah, week three of remote and not going to change anytime soon.

I'm wearing a bathing suit every day. A little known fact. That's honestly it doesn't sound comfortable at all. I think it's very comfortable. It's a bathing suit, and then when I have a really important Zoom meeting, I'll wear a collar shirt so it looks like I'm dressed up. I think we just have to expect that everybody in those Zoom meetings is like in boxers or pajamas on the bottom. I think so. We both got oxygen pulse oxymeters to measure the saturation of your oxygen levels. We both got those this week. Yeah, highly recommended. So you can take a data-driven approach to this and determine if you're,

affected based on your oxygen saturation. So, yeah, I really like this. It's going to prevent me from, you know, if you think about it long enough, you're going to give yourself chest pains and think that you have COVID-19. So it's good to have this just to keep on the, you know, keep on the offensive. Yeah, it's very reassuring, actually. I recommend it for everyone, actually. And in other news, I got a Peloton this week.

There is some sort of ridiculous financing deal on that, right? It was 0% APR for 39 months. It was awesome. Great deal. Yeah, you can thank the Fed, I guess. Well, that sounds like a Peloton ad or an oxygen pulsometer ad. We actually do have a real ad. So Zen Ledger is one of our portfolio companies,

and it's definitely the best tax software out there in the market. It's a tax software that allows you to get your crypto tax is done fast and easy. They have friendly customer service. You can actually call them on the phone. You can email them or you can do a chat, whatever's easier. And you have a little bit more time to do. your crypto taxes this year. But that doesn't mean they're less complicated. And the good thing about Zen Ledger is you can also use it in conjunction with a CPA. So they have a way to add your CPA to your

process. And you can do tax loss harvesting. You can also get a full audit report. And as a special incentive for our listeners, you can enter the coupon code Castle 15 and you can get 15% off your order. That's Zenledger.io. You're a Zenledger customer. Yeah, we're both users. So we can attest to the fact that it's pretty solid tax prep software, which if you're a crypto transactor, you know, you have some crypto, you all know that it's an absolute nightmare to do your taxes. And it's pretty vital to use one of these solutions where you can plug in your trade data and get a, you know, a systematic, comprehensive output that actually makes sense. So we're lucky we got a bit of a tax holiday this year, a deferment at least, but still going to have to do it. Yeah, July 15th,

I guess it's deferred until July 15th. So crazy times. In other news, we've been ramping up the podcast game. We had four episodes this week. Yeah, it was a good week because there's basically nothing else to do but to sit at home and consume content. So mindful of that we're producing content on overdrive. We had a ton of good episodes.

So we started off the week with Patrick Self, actually, over the weekend. So he's the VP of Development at the Chamber of Digital Commerce. This was a fun one. I don't know if you caught some of his book recommendations at the end, but those were really good. But we spent a lot of time talking about the public policy issues facing cryptocurrency startups, talking about some of the things that that organization's lobbying for. So that was a fun one. And then had Urien Timor, a former colleague of ours, who's the director of global macro at Fidelity.

He was kind enough to take some time. Talked a lot about the massive interventions that the Fed is taking and the Treasury. And urine's not like a Bitcoin guy per se, but it was a really interesting discussion because he's very bullish on store value assets coming out of this, coming out of this crisis whenever we do come out of it, thinking that there's going to be an inflationary environment here. And that's what the Fed is pushing for. So we talked about digital currencies. And I thought that was a great perspective. Yeah. And I also posted too.

So I did one with David Vork, who's a good friend of mine, you know, well-known. Bitcoiner, but also one of the creators of the SIA platform, which is actually getting some traction now. People are putting some data up on there. And another one in my crypto dollarization series with Alejandro Machado, who is a Venezuelan that has a really deep grasp of what's going on there in Venezuela in terms of how Bitcoin is actually being used, you know, whether it's for remittance purposes or B2B, you know, export companies or, you know, for store value purposes. So really interesting to get this input from practitioners kind of on the ground in some of these places. Yeah, that was a great episode.

So if anyone has any recommendations for people you think would be great on the podcast, let us know. We're up and running on the podcast. We actually have a few in the tank right now. So next week will be another busy week. I bet we'll do three or four next week. So we'll keep them rolling. All right. So what happened this week?

Well, the number went up. I don't know if you knew, but Bitcoin went up. And I have to say of all the weeks, like you and I have been having a tremendous amount of inbound from all sorts of people asking us about Bitcoin this week. And, you know, not surprisingly, I think it has to do with the fact that people are looking at these interventions, the massive quantitative easing that's happening here. And the fact that Fed is buying all sorts of assets for the first time. and people are saying, how do I play this coming out of the recession?

And what's going to happen here? And obviously the dollar is, the dollar is really the apex predator here, but people are trying to think about what is the inflation resistant asset that you need to have exposure to. And for some people, that's Bitcoin. Yeah, and it's interesting because we're, you know, we're currently in a deflationary environment with the dollar consuming a ton of liquidity. And although it fell, I think, today and yesterday,

it's been rallying really dramatically. Because I guess credits being destroyed as we de-leverage here, which is generally deflationary, which means, well, maybe, if you look at inflation expectations over the next five years, they've actually gone down. So investors expect that the purchasing power of the dollar will remain strong for the foreseeable future. But to me, like, that's not the main issue here.

I know it's very possible that, you know, policymakers overcook it and we get inflation as we come out of this recession. To me, the big issue is that in particular the fiscal stimulus here is a direct handout to entities that have a tight relationship with those that are setting the policy. So, you know, Cantillon Insiders, as Nick Zabwe would call them. To me, that's the real distortion here, regardless of whether we get decrease in the purchasing power of the dollar, which, you know, may happen in the medium term. It's really the fact that the government is intervening and almost nationalizing sectors of the economy to the tune of, you know, one-third of GDP. Like, that's the problem here. You know,

and people are wondering, like, why you would want a non-sovereign monetary system if the dollar remains strong. It's not just because you want protection from inflation. It's also because you want protection from corruption, you know, from discretion over how those, those units of currency are being circulated. So to me, like, that's the real issue. And I think it's also important, you've said this before, and I'm going to botch what the saying is, but when you're running away from a bear, it's not necessarily that you need to be the fastest. You just, you don't have to be the slowest. And so when you think about the Fiat regimes that will topple here, I mean, the dollars is going to be last.

Yeah, exactly. We're seeing developing country currencies get crushed this week, absolutely crushed. And, you know, the truth is, most people don't denominate their savings in dollars globally. They denominate their savings in whatever local currency they're mandated to use. And all those currencies have been faring pretty poorly recently. And so we often look at Bitcoin USD as like the reference rate for Bitcoin, BTC, US, but like that actually doesn't match its performance for most global investors. For most normal folks, their local sovereign currencies are depreciating against the dollar as well.

Yeah, it's an interesting situation where the performance of the dollar doesn't strictly speaking represent what is happening to everyone's savings around the world. Yeah, and I think it is important to just stay sober-minded about this. It's easy to get yourself into a frenzy about how Bitcoin is just so exceptionally well-positioned. I think it is, but you know, it's like we said a couple weeks ago, Bitcoin is still an option on a store of value asset. It's not necessarily that store of value asset yet. It only holds about $120 billion worth of value. If it was a real global store value, it would be in the trillions. You know, obviously we think it's going there, but it's not there yet. And because of this, because it's so

volatile and it's so liquid, it's behaving very much like a risk asset right now. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if we sell off, you know, a little bit more. It's a 24-7 liquid It's not surprising that some of these dislocations that we see in the Bitcoin market happen over the weekends when people are probably anticipating getting margin called on Monday mornings and things like that. And this market infrastructure is just super nascent. So some of these exchanges, custodians, brokerages wouldn't surprise me to see a few of them go out in these periods of high volatility, just completely break or some of them are probably operating fractionally reserved. And, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of leverage. in the system. So we're going to see some hedge funds blow up. We've already seen some blow up. And some people are going to be on the wrong side of this. So we're not saying, to be very clear,

we're not saying that Bitcoin is just a rocket ship going straight up here. But if you take a longer term time horizon, it's just very well positioned. Although one potentially near-term bullish phenomenon, which is taking place in Bitcoin, I want to get into this, is the difficulty adjustment. So we had the second biggest drop in difficulty ever in Bitcoin. It dropped about 16% last night. So normally you might say, well, this doesn't have anything to do with the price because the same number of coins are being produced on the normal schedule. And that's true.

That's why we have the difficulty adjustment. But it tells you a little bit about the constitution of the miners themselves. So from what I understand, of miners actually like to hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet. They don't like to sell it all off as they mine it, right? Because lots of miners have kind of a long bias on Bitcoin. They want to accumulate Bitcoin over time. But when miners fail, when they go out of business,

they kind of have to liquidate their balance sheet because they're in liquidation. And even if they're just marginally profitable, they might have to sell off all of their newly mined bitcoins in order to pay their bills. So the fact that difficulty dropped so much suggests to me that quite a few miners went out of business or turn off their operations. And the miners that are left are those with which are just have generally speaking higher margins. They're more profitable. And they can maybe afford not to have to sell off all their bitcoins as they come in the door.

So I know that's kind of a convoluted explanation, but generally speaking, I think after these significant negative difficulty adjustments, you can assume that your sort of miner that's left in market is mining from a position of strength, and they're not as likely to sell off their whole stash. So I think it's a cause for optimism here. Definitely cause for optimism. Pair that with the fact that we're about 46 days away from a halving event. And you could see some crazy stuff here in the next few weeks. Yeah, I mean, I wasn't the biggest proponent of the halving, but,

I think it's definitely a factor here. And also the fact that Bitcoin's been so turbulent means that people might have forgotten a little bit about the having. So there's less hype, which I think is also good. Yeah, definitely. All right. So let's move on to some deals. First deal is actually Coin Metrics. So the company that you co-founded and that we incubated. Coin Metrics announced that they raised a $6 million series A. It was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from Fidelity, for Us, Castle Island, collaborative fund, Avon Ventures, DCG, Raptor Group, Coinbase, and Communitas Capital.

And they also announced that they have made a couple of really big hires. So Katie Chase, formerly of Fidelity, Kerry Yenisad, formerly of Thompson Reuters, Refunditiv, and Lucas Nuzzi as well. So it's been an exciting development for Coin Metrics. Yeah, so this deal got done a while back and just announced now, very exciting. People sometimes congratulate me when they see this news. But to be very clear, like the coin metrics team is the one that is deserving of the congratulations. And, you know, our contribution is in terms of being a capital partner and giving advice.

But it's Tim and the rest of the fantastic team that deserves credit for building such a fantastic product and getting such good early traction. Yeah, I agree. So congratulations to the whole team over there at Coin Metrics, really doing great work with data and doing great work with institutions. Another deal that got done this week, or announced this week, rather, is Balancer Labs. So this is an automated market maker. They're focused on defy use cases. They raised $3 million in a round led by accomplice and placeholder. So Ash, Egan, and Chris Berniske there leading that deal.

So good to see them working together. But aside from that, it was a light week for deals. Yeah, not a lot of net new deals being announced. I'm sure there's still a backlog of deals yet to be announced. But, you know, it's tough to do new deals right now, or at least I think most firms are, you know, saying they're open for business and, you know, we're obviously open for business.

But a lot of people just adjusting to what this whole paradigm of working from home is going to look like. And, you know, meeting entrepreneurs in person is a big part of this game. So it'll be interesting to see how fun. adapt to it. Certainly deals will get done. It's just, it's going to be interesting. Yeah, and I think a lot of firms are in wait and see mode, trying to determine how bad this economic crisis is going to be. And it's, you know, it's possible that maybe things get back to normal in a few months. I don't know if that's the most likely situation, but certainly possible.

You'd think we're going to have a second wave here, though? Yeah, I think it's unfortunately. unfortunately inevitable. I'm partial to Balogies thesis that we're going to have red zones and green zones. So states and cities which have been cleared after a quarantine period and basically shut their borders to the places where the epidemic is still raging. I think that that's probably the path forward here. It looks like Trump sent a letter to governors talking about low, medium high ranks for counties. And you can think about that as the first step towards the red zone, green zone. I also think we're going to see a lot of people wearing masks come in the fall. Yeah, I really dislike the masks wearing was kind of stigmatized or people were chastised for wearing masks.

I mean, it's clear that it's not perfectly effective, but in countries with high rates of mask wearing, they've done a lot better here. And it seems like it really does slow the trend. transmission of this thing. My mother made me a Patriots mask. I don't know if I told you that. Out of like cloth or something? What's it made of? It's not like an N95 mask, but it's like a homemade Patriots thing. Stylish and safe. Yeah. Unfortunately for a franchise that's in decline, as it seems. I would, I mean, I definitely wouldn't say that, but it is stylish and it is safe. So what other news items do we have this week?

So the Tezos Foundation, did you see they announced, or there was a report, I don't know if this is officially yet, but a report that they settled their two class action lawsuits. Yeah, that's something that I think people had sort of forgotten about these class action suits rumbling. They'd been going for a long time now, and it looks like they're in the clear there, although the SEC hasn't weighed in yet. But yeah, that was a civil case between investors and the issuers. So that's wrapped up now. Tazos did their sale before the Dow report. So you'd think that whatever treatment Ethereum got, they should theoretically that would apply to them too, right?

Yeah, that's the theory. But the SEC has been pretty punitive in some cases, even with those pre-Dow report cases. Nebulous would be one example that I could think of, where they raised in 2014 and they still had to pay full recession, I believe. Yeah, that's. is right. Another story related to a token sale this week was a federal judge has actually ordered telegram to refrain from issuing its gram token. They were planning to do that next month.

And, you know, I don't know how you can read this as any other way than to say that this is kind of a death blow for the SAF. I don't know how, you know, how you can read this judge's ruling and fund a SAF deal right now. Yeah, it can be appealed, potentially, you know, at the circuit level. But my interpretation from having read what the crypto lawyers had to say about this is that effectively the judge has ruled on the facts of the case, even though it's still ongoing, especially he felt that the token itself was effectively security. And the fact that Telegram was issuing it out to the market in a roundabout way through investors, which are acting as underwriters, that didn't exempt them from the telegram token being ultimately considered a security. So it seems like this,

yeah, as you say, it's a death blow to the SAFT. Because this will become case law, right? You know, this is a precedent. Yeah, and I think what you said around the ruling is around the facts and circumstances of Telegram, but I think other judges will probably have the same interpretation for other SAFT cases. So it's just hard to say. see this as anything but a real death blow. Happy to be proven wrong on that, but it doesn't look good for SAFs. To me, it seems like a common sense interpretation of the law. If you sell a something which you admit is an investment product to, you know, VC firms and token funds, and they turn around and issue that on the open market in kind of informal way. And that ends up sitting in the hands of

retail. It seems like you're just tried to skirt. You just added one additional step of intermediation, but it's still effectively a public offering. So I think it's actually a common sense view that the judge has taken here. It seems like some people are going to try to launch, some developers are going to try to launch the network regardless, though. I don't know if you saw that. Yeah. More power to them, I guess. See what happens. I don't know if they're going to honor the token distribution in terms of the tokens that were sold or just do it as kind of a fair launch. It would be interesting if they did the latter. But yeah, I don't know if that's actually even possible. I don't think they're going to be using proof of work or anything.

Did you read Matt Alborg's latest piece, the Latin America, Bitcoin trading follows the heartbeat of Venezuela? Yeah, I love that. And I think it's a great accompaniment to the podcast that I did with Alejandro because we talked a little bit about the dynamics of the local Bitcoin's market in Venezuela, but Matt Alborg's piece goes really into depth, in depth there, and basically explains that Bitcoin is a bridge currency for people to import foreign currencies into Venezuela, you know, typically the dollar, although there's others. And he actually demonstrates that Venezuelan local Bitcoin markets are connected in kind of a spider webway to the rest of Latin America. And he shows this with power cut data, which is really, really interesting.

It's very clever piece of work, highly recommended. He's got the best website name out there, useful tulips.org. How good is that? Yeah, tongue in cheek. Very clever, yeah. A couple other blog posts that I enjoyed reading this week. So Taleb had a post corporate socialism. The government is bailing out investors and managers and not you.

There's only like a four-minute read. So I'm sure every venture capitalist in the world read that one. Yeah, Taleb is actually very good at being concise. And, you know, he's a great writer. So I'm very glad that he's speaking out against the bailouts because it seems to me that everybody, for the most part, all economists and journalists are all on the side of bailouts automatically, as if there even shouldn't be a question. And I think it's important that people actually speak up because

there's a huge amount of perversity here. And Talebapsley nails it. He basically says, everyone that's getting bailed out, stacked on a ton of leverage, and captured all of the upside for the last decade. And now when there's downside, they were unprepared and they're claiming that it was unforeseeable and there was no way they could have prepared for it. And so the downside is guaranteed by the government. But he kind of points out that if these companies are going to be effectively nationalized by the government, there should be no upside. The managers should be paid like bureaucrats.

There shouldn't be significant upside if the downside is guaranteed. It's an unfair trade. And I'm definitely pretty sympathetic with that view. It's the Bob Rubin trade. Yeah, it's a good trade if you can make it. Exactly. Alan Farrington's post was pretty similar, not as concise, but this is not capitalism, was the name of his post, also on Medium.

Yeah, if you haven't read it yet, so Alan's a good friend of mine. He actually works for Bailey Gifford, which is a big UK asset manager. We went to school together, we went to undergrad together. But yeah, he's one of the best writers on, on finance and Bitcoin topics, in my opinion.

And this is not capitalism, which is a pretty long post, is incredibly good. It breaks down exactly what's wrong with our kind of highly financialized system in a very erudite way, but also quite comprehensible, quite accessible, quite accessible. So that one is highly, highly recommended if you like the TILAP post. Yeah, exactly. So those are two good posts. The other thing I wanted to get your perspective on this week was, Bloomberg had this interesting article that talked on some of the dislocations that we're seeing in the gold market this week,

notably around the problems that are arising from trades that involve a physical delivery and just some of the issues that are happening there in that market. What's your take on some of the gold stuff? Yeah, so I bought gold this week. Actually, my girlfriend asked me if we'd get some gold. So I guess she felt that the dollar was being devalued. It's kind of... It's very smart of her. What type of gold did you buy?

She typically doesn't opine on investment decisions. So it was cool to hear. We bought some jewelry at this website Mene, which is run by Roy Sabag, who's a pretty well-known commentator on gold. And actually, he likes to talk trash about Bitcoin all the time. And these people have the... It's...

frustrating to see the gold bugs and the bickoiners have so much in common but they sometimes yeah it's so weird they should be on the same side they're like on the same team on 90% of things i don't understand why they're always fighting it's just small differences man yeah what is it the tyranny of small differences so we bought some gold but yeah gold if you go on any of these retail brokers for gold you're trying to buy small denominations gold you're finding that it's basically impossible to get it and the main reason for this appears to be that a lot of the refineries in Switzerland and northern Italy are shut down because of the virus right now. And so there's no new supply coming onto the market.

So the gold markets are effectively seized up and it's causing all kinds of issues. The main one being, aside from the shortage being that the U.S. gold market, the CME or the Comax market, is trading at a significant, I believe, premium to the London market for gold. And on Tuesday, this was up to 4%, which is kind of unprecedented premium. They should really be trading, you know, within a couple bucks of each other. So that was a pretty dramatic thing. And a lot of gold investors are wondering if these paper gold products are actually backed by real gold, which is kind of an interesting.

we've seen this conspiracy kind of be floated many, many times in the past, but it seems like there might be some credence to it now. Yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean, maybe we'll find out if they're actually backed pretty soon here. But Paxos's gold product is pretty ahead of its time in the sense that it's a tokenized representation of gold that you have assurances that down to like a warehouse receipt. And you can freely trade that back and forth. Now, obviously, if you're looking to take physical delivery, it's a little bit more complicated.

So maybe it doesn't solve every problem, but it's an interesting product. And maybe a good time to just point out that Bitcoin solves that. Yeah. So one of the issues is that the different gold, so the gold circulates in these walled gardens. So the London gold is not compatible with the New York gold, as it turns out. They're in different denominations, and they have different what are called good delivery rules. So it looks like the CME is actually going to change their good delivery rules to allow London-based gold to settle contracts in the U.S. to help resolve this arbitrage, which is developed. But yeah, generally speaking, this issue of verification of the asset, you know, proving whether someone has it or not, that's very hard for gold because gold is a physical thing.

And it's kind of costly to audit, whereas obviously for Bitcoin, it's quite trivial to perform these audits. although I will concede that many exchanges and custodians do not do this. Yeah, so that was interesting. I think we need to track the performance of the gold market here and keep an eye on this. Gold and Bitcoin could be moving in tandem here over the next few weeks. Gold's had a, they've had a good year, actually. The gold's been one of the best performing assets this year, kind of unsurprisingly. Gold's up.

Yeah, we talked about this a little bit with Urien, if you haven't checked that out yet. Did you see this news that Tim Draper came out and he was talking about he's focused on infrastructure investments in India, which I think is a great idea. So that country recently reversed. Their anti-crypto blockchain policies opened the door for a bunch of startups to get off the ground. And I think we're going to see a wave of exchanges, custodians, all sorts of infrastructure companies get built in India. So smart move by Draper to get ahead of this. India is a country where gold savings by households is very popular. And Americans kind of find it to be an alien concept,

but there's many countries worldwide where it's still a super popular way to save value outside the confines of the state and the banking system. So maybe they'll find crypto to be interesting as well. There certainly was a bit of an Indian crypto industry before this ban. Yeah, effectively they had the death hammer. about a year or two ago, and now it looks like it's positioned to come back, which is good. You did a podcast this week. Well, I guess you did a podcast a long time ago that came out this week with Ark Invest.

Yeah, it was recorded some weeks ago, but it's actually one of my favorite ones I've done recently. If you guys don't follow Yassine, highly recommended. He's their analyst over there. He took over from Chris Berniske. He does a great job. He just had a report on mining, which came out. Our podcast was about Bitcoin. It was also about this notion of crypto dollarization, which is really taken off.

And if you actually look at stable coins, in the space of one month, they've gone from $4.5 billion to $7.8 billion. So almost doubling. And I don't expect that trend to slow down any time soon. People are using them for more than just moving money between exchanges or trading or traders holding crypto assets in a risk off way. So stablecoins are really having a moment. People aren't talking about it.

Yeah. I wish there was a way to monitor. And maybe there is a way to figure out how much of this print has been just liquidations of Bitcoin and other crypto assets that are stabilizing into stablecoins versus just net new dollars. They're saying, you know, hey, we need to have some dry powder ready to buy Bitcoin at the dip. Yeah, it's very hard to know. But the growth, I mean, you look at Ethereum, Ethereum has more transactional volume in stablecoin terms than it does for ether,

the native unit. So stablecoins first killer app, as we say. Yeah, I actually, I was talking to someone today, the Algarand version of Tether, I think, is going live next week. So we might see even more activity with Tether. They're alive on something like seven blockchains. It's crazy. Yeah. Well, and the other thing about stablecoins is going to be interesting is the way that stable coins deal with negative interest rates.

And I know that there are some people out there who have some pretty clever solutions that, you know, we won't talk about until they're public, but that'll be interesting. Yeah, I mean, the way they monetize is through this net interest income. I don't see how they can be profitable if there's negative interest rates. I mean, at that point, they'll owe the bank. So, you know, they'll have to run it as a loss leader. They'll have to impose a fee on transactions. Yeah, there will be some interesting solutions. I think it also depends on who's offering the stable coin. You could see this being a loss leader for certain companies. Yeah, like BitFinex is clearly benefited from the existence of Tether. For sure. in terms of connecting them to liquidity. So you can, yeah. But yeah, I think negative interest rates actually make it much more complicated to monetize these things. Yeah, I'm just going to go on the record and say, I don't like negative interest rates.

Who does? Yeah, seriously, who does? Get your money confiscated for the privilege of lending it to the bank? Yeah, I don't like it. Let's not do that. Well, it's almost here now. Rates are almost negative in the U.S. So that's it for the podcast stories.

I guess we should close out with like some recommendations again. I think people like that. And why don't you go first? All right. So I've been reading one of my favorite books. What did I talk about when I talk about running by Heruki Murakami? Awesome book. Sort of autobiographical accounts.

It's different from the rest of his corpus. But I've been running a lot recently. That's kind of the weird thing about being in quarantine. You can still go outside as long as there's no one around. So it's a chance to actually get healthy. It is a chance to get healthy. So on that topic of running, so little known fact, I was a college runner. Have you read the book Once a Runner?

That's by far my favorite book about running. It's actually a novel. I haven't. I highly recommend. I think that might be the book that I've reread the most times ever. Really? Aside from that, do you have a book recommendation for all of us that are trapped in quarantine? Yeah, I've been reading a bunch of books.

I've also been doing Audible books. I was talking with Patrick South about this. I'm actually reading the Facebook book right now by Stephen Levy. Pretty good. It's not bad. And then I'm also in parallel reading the Godfather book. So I just finished the main one and now I'm reading The Last Dawn. And then while I've been out running, I just finished that will never work,

is by Mark Randolph, the Netflix co-founder. I enjoyed that one. So I've been trying to read as much as I can. You clearly have a lot of spare time on your hands these days. Well, I don't. I have a baby, but she goes to bed early, so then I can read. I have a non, we were talking about running. I have a little life hack for you, if you don't already do this.

What we got? So when I run, my calves tend to flare up. Like if I'm running too much, that's the first thing that goes is my calves. And it's really hard to like fix that inflammation. And so what I started doing was wearing compress sleeves to bed. So I wear these, they're from like your ankles up to your knee. I use a brand called Sigvirus. And I wear them to bed and I wake up and I feel like a million bucks.

It totally promotes good blood flow. that sounds pretty involved i don't know if i want to do any of that stuff it's like 20 bucks on amazon you get a couple sleeves throw them on before you go to bed you wake up feel like a million bucks well there you have it fellows book recommendations and health tips that's what this podcast is turning into that's why you listen to this podcast so you know we'll be back next week with a bunch more tips and uh you know hopefully we haven't gone crazy with our quarantines by then Yeah, until then, stay safe. Stay inside.

It's your patriotic duty. That's true. All right, everyone, see you next week.