On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 01/02/26 (2026 predictions, wealth taxes, secret insolvencies) (EP.694)

Episode Date: January 2, 2026

Matt and Nic are back for the first OTB show of 2026. In this episode: Matt's ice rink adventures The House issues a draft of the PARITY Act The trouble with wealth taxes DATs continue to bleed out We talk about Nic's fiction story Predictions for 2026 Is there a secret exchange insolvency? What constitutes insider trading for prediction markets?  Is the four year cycle finally over?  Is it time to try socialfi again?  Kickstarter snafus Content mentioned in this episode: Nic Carter, Trillion Dollar Salvage  

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, $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 into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative 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 the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Happy New Year. recording this 4 o'clock on new year's day during the alabama indiana game roseball i didn't know that was happening so it's jan 1 2026 we missed we didn't do it last week it's christmas yeah we skipped out there wasn't much happening last week but we'll touch on every all the news stories the few that there were yeah we have two weeks of news here and it's almost not even enough for one episode

felt a little bad though we didn't record it but it was christmas day And nothing happened. And almost nothing happened this week, too. Yeah, it's been quiet. I just, uh, you pulled me off the, the skating rink to record this one. I built a diesel backyard skating rink this year. What is the diesel? What's the diesel part?

Oh, just that it's like diesel is a frame of, uh, just a choice of word there. It's a, it's a, it's not like, it's not on diesel. Motorized. It's not motorized. But I had a, I had a leak in it. So I had to, I spent. a lot of time and attention trying to patch the leak, but I think I got it down. I mean, isn't it just made of ice, though?

I put down a tarp, and then I have these kind of plastic things on the side, and then you get these metal clips, but I got a leak in it, so I'd get some flexial, some heavy-duty tape that can survive water. It was a whole production. So, do you have a kit, or did you just figure out through some kind of ancestral northern knowledge how to build an ice rink. I cheated a little bit. I bought this kit from this company. I'll give them a free plug, easy ice rink. I bought it a couple years ago. I've had it for a couple years. It's very good. They sell you the plastics, basically. This is a very like Minnesota or Canada

coated thing. It's not really New England. Oh, I think so. It's been freezing up here. And we also had four inches of snow today. So in addition to shoveling my driveway, I had to shovel out the rink. This is the thing that people do when they have a pond, right? Yeah. You like to do a homemade zamboni and you just smooth out the pond. It is. The zamboni part is hard. So every night I've got to go out there with warm water because you have to put warm water on it.

If you actually want to get a flat surface and I'm out there with a, I've got a big squeegey thing, big almost like rake looking thing. It's a whole production. And after anyone skates on it, you have to zamboni it again. theoretically you're supposed to do that i don't do it every single time but i'm not playing like full blown hockey on it wow what an enterprise it is you know you got to you got to keep the kids busy well they were a very small number of deals to run through very small number of deals well we did a podcast last week so i sat down with matthew lemurrell and mitch mitchiegeon of blockchain co-investors this is becoming our yearly recap and predictions episode so we talked about 2025

the key themes, talked about some of the expectations for 2026. So that was a fun one. And yeah, let's talk about some of the deals from last week. So first up, you have the clearing company. That's a prediction markets company. They were acquired by Coinbase. It's an interesting one, right? Because they just got formed, I think about a year ago, the clearing company, they were pursuing a DCM license. I don't know if they actually got that yet. But it seems like this market right now is just a duopoly with Calci and Polymarket. But Coinbase is going to be making a push to get into this, it seems like. Coinbase in their post calls themselves the everything exchange.

Now, what is the equilibrium here of prediction markets? Robin Hood's going at this. Coinbase is now going at this. You have the two big boys already. Where do you think we converge here from a market perspective? That's a great question. I don't know what the moat is aside from brand value for a prediction market. I mean, retail order flow seems like a moat, right?

So Coinbase and Robin Hood would have to spend less on customer acquisition since they already have a bunch of retail users. One of my predictions, we're going to do predictions later. One of my predictions is to do with prediction markets, so I can't reveal it yet. All right, we'll get to that in predictions. Next one up is Architect. This is a centralized perpetual futures exchange.

They raised $35 million from Miami. International Holdings, Tiogo Capital, Galaxy Digital, and others. Coinbacks is a stable coin payments infrastructure company. There is 4.2 million from bank tech ventures and Paxos. Then it's Rocket, which is a prediction market company. They raised 1.5 million from electric, tangent, and boaty ventures. Then you have easy dot fun. That is a trading competition platform.

There is 2 million from Moranaventures and others. All right. Do you want to hop into some news from the past couple of weeks? I'd say one of the bigger ones was the story that J.P. Morgan is reportedly exploring, adding crypto trading for its institutional clients. What did you make of that? Wow. I actually didn't see that at all. But I mean, it's very belated for them relative to some of their competitors, wouldn't you say? Yeah, and who knows what this means? I mean, could they just do agency execution? They obviously could, I've known that the bank regulators have made that possible as of about a month ago.

So not surprising. Some of those Jamie Diamond sound bites aren't going to look great. Yeah. Not a ton of big pieces of news. I guess Trump is hinting that there is somehow new Trump token that's connected to one of his public companies. Is that a thing that's happening? There's some air drop going to DJT holders. I didn't really follow that one.

But yes, that did happen. I also, a couple days ago, Coinbase announced the first arrest was made in India. It was a former customer service representative that was tied to that massive data breach. I guess that's positive, right? Like, catch these people.

But the more I hear these stories, the more I'm just like, why did you have this set up in the first place in India? Yeah. It's the perils of outsourcing, really. I mean, it's harder to find these people and harder to work with local lines. enforcement and harder to vet them.

It doesn't look good, to be honest. You outsource and then Coinbase customer data is some of the most sensitive data that exists. Totally. And I think it was basically the whole database was leaked, right? And I don't know if it was technically outsourcing. I guess they were Coinbase employees, I think. But you should really have that PII state side, I would think. I mean, there actually should be laws for that.

Yeah, and you shouldn't let individual low-level agents get access to the whole database. No, I mean, definitely, I mean, glad they caught them. Hopefully there's more arrests there. Speaking of arrests, it looks like former FTX execs Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Ashad Singh have reached final resolutions in their SEC cases. They're each going to be banned for at least eight years from serving as executives at other companies. looks like Allison, I think we talked about this a couple weeks ago, is set to be released from prison already. She served about 12 months of a two-year sentence.

Not being on, you know, executive-level boards or anything for eight years feels a little bit light for these three. Yeah, I'm shocked. It wasn't a lifetime ban. Really should have been. Yeah. The House has released draft of the crypto, a crypto tax bill, which is called the Digital Asset Parity Act,

which includes an optional five-year tax deferral and staking rewards and a capital gains tax exemption for a stable coin transactions under $200. That is not the big tax story of Twitter, though. What did you make of Rocana just melting down on Twitter the past few weeks? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think it is indicative of where the wind is blowing, which is, so for context, we're always floating a 5% wealth tax, I think, right, for billionaires in California.

Yes. Which, that's a ballot initiative. Yeah, I mean, it raises huge problems for anybody with illiquid wealth as an entrepreneur,

for instance. It forces divestiture. It forces secondary transactions to occur, which is really, sometimes it's structurally impossible or there's just no buyer much of the time, you know, with private startups and basically forces founders to lose control of their own companies, maybe even before they're public.

So obviously very problematic. But I think if, you know, AI does what I think it's going to do, which is to empower capital, the expense of labor, then I think, I think, this is exactly the kind of thing we're going to see, these kinds of reprisals. I think that's right. It just kind of breaks the system, right? So you bring up entrepreneurs. There are countless entrepreneurs, not even in the crypto space, but just broader tech that are billionaires on paper. They've raised at a $5 billion dollar valuation, $6 billion valuation. They own 30, 40% of the company. How would you actually pay that tax? There's no real secondary market to transact when the people.

payment is just going back to the government. So it kind of breaks that. Also breaks the limited partner model, I would think. So you're a high net worth individual. You're an LP in venture funds. The venture funds get markups. And so you'd have to pay taxes on those markups. You just wouldn't become an LP in venture capital funds. So it could really kill the golden goose that is American innovation. Especially in California with so much VC and angel investing and startup formation. I mean, I think the fallacy inherent in the reasoning here is thinking that capital is not mobile. Capital is more mobile than it's ever been in human history. And you see, and I actually asked Rokane of this, and he replied to my question,

do you see in response to all these wealth taxes? Like in Norway, this happened. And then all of the billionaires just moved to Switzerland. Yeah, it happened in France, too, with a millionaire's tax. Yeah, so the politicians are. gambling that the entrepreneurs are captive in some way, you know, and then they try and create exit taxes as well. That's another thing. But they don't understand this. This is an iterated game. So it's kind of like a default. If a sovereign defaults, creditors don't trust them again

after that, obviously. And if they default once, they're actually very likely to default again in the future, right? Argentina has developed it, I think, eight times. So it's the exact same thing. You might call it a one-time wealth tax, but everybody's going to remember that. No one will ever trust you, and so they won't trust

your state with their wealth ever again. So I think it creates a permanent kind of fiscal hole, and then you have to tax everybody else. It's left more to try and make up the hole. It also just shines a light, I think, for some

people around, okay, well, what are the taxes going to be used for? And shining a light on some of the grift and the fraud that's happening in some of these states, I think will be the next few months. This Twitter post by this guy, Nick Shirley, I think is one of the top five viewed Twitter posts of all time at this point, exposing some of the corruption happening in Minnesota. Yeah. And, you know, a lot of people are saying, oh, well, he didn't prove anything. But also, there's already been hundreds of indictments of cases of daycare fraud in Minnesota. those cases are just their public record. Right.

So it's already the case. We definitely know that there is fraud. It does make me wonder what percentage of the so-called non-discretionary entitlements, you know, Medicare Social Security is fraud, because all this stuff is under the banner of Medicare. And then you look at all these states where the number one profession is at home health aid or something like that. Like basically someone's getting paid to stay at home.

with someone they're purportedly caring for. I mean, what percentage of the federal budget is just straight up fraud? Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, it does call the question if there's a way to hold people more accountable via technology. It's actually a really good use case for a stable coin payment for some of these transfer payments to happen in a very public setting. Yeah, and do you remember around COVID, PPP and CARES Act,

there is this real urgency to get those payments out the door. and to not get in the way of it by doing fraud checks, even the most basic fraud checks, like, okay, do you have a social security number? What's your date of birth? Are you a real human? That didn't happen. Anybody could set up a business like Hellcat LLC

and then claim, you know, that they had X many employees. The estimates, government estimates, for CARES out in PPP, is that the frauders in the hundreds of billions. Hundreds of billions. And everyone was out there, complaining about bailouts for AIG or whatever, you know, Occupy Wall Street. This is much

greater in scale. And nobody's, where are the demonstrations? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. It's, I feel like the social contract is totally deteriorating in America. Nobody believe there's no sense of a shared mission. It's just what can I extract from the government? All right, let's hop into some other news. Let's talk about some of the dat stuff that happened the past couple of weeks. strategy raised another $748 million in cash via their at the money offerings of micro strategy stock. Rather than deploying it into Bitcoin, though, last week, they added the funds to their U.S. dollar reserve, which was created earlier this month to support future dividend payments

on their preferred stock offerings. So not throwing that in the market. And then you had Ethzilla. This is one of the big Ethereum debts. They sold $75 million worth of their ETH. They discontinued their MNAV tracker on their website, and they're pivoting to tokenization. So RIP, ETHZILA, as an Ethereum dad.

Yeah, there's another one, Prenetics, which is David Beckham backed. They were meant to be buying Bitcoin to become a dat. I don't even know if they were a dat. They were just maybe a public company with an accumulation strategy, and they are now out of the business. they are done buying Bitcoin. They're sick of it. I didn't even know David Beckham had a debt, but I'm not surprised.

2026 is going to be a year, the long dat hangover. Like there will be a year long hangover relating to the dads. Yeah, in more ways than one. I mean, it could be a little bit of a hangover on the price, but I think you'll have just a lot of, a lot of BS coming out, A lot of Wall Street Journal articles about the Grift. Yeah, I agree. And probably some consolidation, probably some line downs,

probably some forcible wind downs, as regulators discover that something was done wrong, some paper wasn't filed correctly. I'd be very surprised if we see these things trading above 1X, really at any point this year. I think that's right. Shortly before Christmas, Mike Selig was confirmed as the next chairman of the CFTC.

So that's a really positive development, I think, for our industry, to have someone that knowledgeable in that seat. So I think that's every major financial regulator is now in the seat. I think that's right. It took a long time. It did. It takes longer than you think. China has allowed commercial banks to pass through interest directly to their

customer's digital yuan holdings. That is contrast. with how it works under the Genius Act, which is the prohibition of interest from stable coins. Yeah, but it's just a CBDC type of thing, right? So kind of different things. Yeah, and, you know, is it really prohibited in this country, given that there's still some loopholes?

All right, so everyone's doing these prediction episodes this week. We did one, I think, last year, maybe the year before. I don't have a ton of predictions. I probably have three or four, though. You want to do a few predictions for 2026? Yeah, I mean, we're going to have to review our last year's predictions, or otherwise there's no point to even making them. That's true, but we're not ready to do that, are we?

Yeah, we'll do have to do that next week. But we do have some ready. So my first one is, I think we will see a consortium of banks issue a stable coin here in the U.S. this year in 2026. and I think it'll be, you know, three of the top ten banks, at least in this country, it'll be part of that consortium. Interesting. All right.

And so what is the stable coin going to be used for then? I think anything you want, your imagination is the limit. So I think it could be a retail stable coin. I think it could be for interbank. I think it could be a B2B stable coin. I think maybe just all the above. See, the interbank. stable coin is the one that I think would actually have a huge needle moving effect at these banks

on back office expenses. If you could have some sort of a utility settlement coin to, you know, function as the settlement leg for overnight repos and the corporate bond market, things like that. That actually makes a ton of sense to me. I don't actually know if you could do it through a consortium unless it was blessed by the government, though. It'd have to be settling trillions of dollars. So, you know, you'd have a little bit of a credit risk problem maybe on the issuer. well zelle is a consortium that's a consortium more for retail though that's more of a Venmo competitor but if you want to settle quadrillions of dollars in the securities market

I think you're going to have to have bank involvement and government involvement but I don't know I'm less persuaded that a retail facing bank consortium coin would do anything it's not going to be available defy markets I think they're going to want to do it anyway. I agree. I agree. They'll do it. All right. I think that's probably a safe prediction that there'll be some sort of consortium. I'll go with a prediction that is also in the bank space. I think you will see a bank acquire a crypto custodian this year, a full-blown crypto custodian. I can see it. Got to be in the game, right? I think these banks are going to start to do subcustody, and that makes sense. But some of these banks are going to look at this and say,

we're taking a lot of risk to sub-custodians, and why not just buy the whole thing? Bit of a theme so far. My second prediction is, I think the Bitcoin developer community does start to get serious about quantum this year. And I allege that they have not been serious about it, even though they disagree with my characterization.

I would allege they haven't been serious. And I think the catalyst will be jitters from the institutional holders, about quantum as they're meaningful developments. Jitter is caused by you, I should add. Yeah, I'm not an impartial observer. I've been stirring things up. That's true.

So you wrote, that's a good dovetail into you wrote a, what would you call this? A little fan fiction, it's called the trillion dollar salvage. We're not calling it fan fiction, Matt. That's belittling. Pajorative? Yeah, because that implies that it's like, Udkowsky tier, you know, like not real literature.

But this is more than I'm thinking Jonathan Swift or Hemingway, really. All right. I'll put you in maybe this is a little bit more like Andy Weir, the Martian. It's like stuff that could happen. Yeah, I mean, that is actually the genre. It's hard sci-fi speculative fiction. That's precisely the genre. You're right.

Trillion dollar salvage. So basically that Q-Day happens. I don't know if you want to spoil the ending. Well, don't spoil it. Yeah. Don't spoil the ending. Go read it. There's,

where's six chapters you wrote. Yeah. This is the first fiction story I've written. I used to write a lot when I was a kid. But since about the age of 13, this is the first real fiction story that I sat down and wrote from start to finish. I think it's good.

I think it's actually like a likely scenario, I would say. It's possible. Like it could happen this way, you know? But it's not really a story about Bitcoin or Quantum. It's about humanity and human futility and arrogance. And it's actually a modern retelling of the story of Faust, if you really think about it.

So I'll leave you with that. But I encourage you to read it. I vibe coded a custom website for the story. Oh, is that what that is? That's a pretty good. Illustrations that were done by AI. That part's true. The writing was done by me, less than there be any accusations.

Now, without giving away the story here, the Bitcoin private key here, is that yours? It's a real private key. Yeah. Does it have any coins in it? I didn't. I thought about putting some in as the Easter egg. But yeah, that's 100% real. All right.

Very good. All right. I'm going to go with the second prediction that is, I don't know, maybe it's a controversial opinion, maybe it's not. But my second prediction is that we find out in 2026 that a large exchange has been operating from a point of insolvency since 10-10. Since 10-10, yeah. So basically internalized a lot of losses on perpetual futures contracts and the market turmoil of 10-10, has been using customer funds, has been selling down longer-tail alt-coins and getting them delisted. Did I ever tell you about this? So it kind of...

That's an interesting twist on the conspiracy. Yeah, I think that if you were in exchange and you had a huge hole, and this is not fully my idea. And the hole is denominated in what? Well, the hole is probably denominated in BTC and Eath primarily. And so you need to come up with BTC and Eath. You'd probably try to come up with USDC. You'd probably just be selling everything you had,

and you'd probably start with the longer tail coins that no one really trade. and you'd nuke them down to effectively zero and then you'd dollarize the claim. So you'd say, you know, BS coin number 100 on our exchange, we're no longer supporting. The total market value of it when we delisted is $3 million of which we have a million of exposure on our exchange. We're just going to credit you, USDC. But you've actually been selling down like $20 million of this since October 10th. And so you're actually just pilfering customer money.

to plug your hole. And I am not convinced that the proof of reserves on some of these exchanges are up to snuff, definitely not on the longer tail. And so I think we will find out in 2026 that at least one non-U.S. exchange has been running fractional since October. I would be more surprised if this didn't end up being the case. Yeah. So you're persuaded.

Yeah. 100% because there's not that many other explanations. for why it's trading the way that it is, you know? Yeah, I mean, precious metals are ripping. You get the flows into the ETF or basically continuing. I think you just have a huge four-seller in this market, maybe a couple of them. Yeah, like what's the opposite of a beach ball held underwater? Yeah.

It's like we got a lead weight tied to her foot. Yeah. So I agree. my last prediction is there will be a major prediction market scandal or more scandals this year of insider trading and we're going to have to find some court will have to decide what constitutes insider trading on a prediction market and that'll that'll force the prediction markets I think into a tough decision because right now they kind of operate in this gray zone where they're encouraging people to basically surface private information by trading on it and expressing it in the price.

But that's a little conflicted, I think. And so that's the tension that's going to have to be resolved. Kind of like the open sea insider trading, right? I don't think you should be allowed to trade on these things if you work at Polymarket or CalShay. I don't think you should actually be allowed to trade on your own venue. Yeah, I'm thinking more like some influential. executive in a sports league or a member of Congress, they'll trade on some insider knowledge they

have and then we'll have to decide, well, what is this? Is this allowed or is it not? Yeah, that's a tricky one. I mean, that's happening at scale right now. Yeah, rampant. Rampant. Like you got Google employees trading on the, you know, it's like it's happening all over the place. Some of these markets, I mean, if you worked at the White House, you'd just be making a ton of There's so many that are political. There's so many people that have these positions of minor power where they do have privileged informational flow that was impossible to monetize before and now you can monetize it. And a lot of those people are tempted.

Yeah. Do you think we're going to end up in a situation where we have a federal bill on prediction markets or is just too early in the life cycle of this category? I think the CFTC will be pressured to be much more active. with these kinds of enforcements, but I don't know if they're equipped to. So something's going to have to change, I think.

I think maybe Congress will be asked to consider this question. Good luck. I mean, good luck getting Congress to do anything. If they get market structure done, that would be a tall task. And prediction markets, I don't think, are anywhere in the market structure tax. All right, my next prediction is around the Dats.

So it's an interesting thing. I read a lot of these SEC filings when these Dats go public, when they do their change of control. And the disclosures are a bit lacking. And certainly the 8K disclosures are kind of a joke. The quarterlies are not great either. I think that you will have at least five major DAT lawsuits in 2026. And I think the starting gun here will be when the 10Ks get filed because the 10Ks are much richer in terms of information. about conflicted transactions and insider dealings.

I think you're just going to see a lot of dirt come out around the sponsors, the issuers, some of the insiders that have done deals with some of these debts. I think you're just going to see a ton of lawsuits here. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Maybe more than five. Yeah, probably more than,

I guess that's a pretty safe assumption because there's, what are there like 50 plus deaths, right? Well, this is some pretty gloomy predictions. I actually, maybe I'll, I think we'll have an up year. I guess we didn't say. Yeah, let's do one good one. The four year cycle is over technically, right?

It's dead. The witch is dead. We must rejoice. I actually, you know, not financial advice as it never is, but I actually think we'll have a really good year in the crypto market prices, if nothing else, because of one of my earlier predictions around in exchange just being a four-seller right now. So I think you will have the reverse effect of once that stops from a flow's perspective, you'll just see a kind of a jump in the price of crypto assets.

The thing is about the four-year cycle is that you're still in the thrall of the four-year cycle if you're saying it's dead, thus we can have an up year. But you're still basically saying the four-year cycle is brewing everything around you. Well, that's not what I'm saying per se. I'm just saying that there's a lot of force selling in this market right now, and I think the natural state of things would not be such that we're trading at 88K right now. Yeah. No, I agree. And I'm glad that we are shedding all of our illusions,

in particular the stock to flow model. You don't hear people talking about it anymore. I haven't seen much about that guy. I think all those people became accolates of the micro-strategy perpetual motion theory, which also has been debunked, in my opinion. And so I think it's actually very healthy because all these delusions are just being forcibly disproven. Yeah, probably healthier for the market overall.

You think we'll have any breakout categories this year in terms of, you know, I guess prediction markets is a breakout category, but social fies, that dead? Any new killer category emerging? I think there will be meaningful traction for tokenized equities. So I think that's going to be a real thing. And then I do think someone will take another stab at, I don't think we're going to call it socialify,

just like a social network with strong property rights mediated by blockchain. So I think someone's going to take a stab with that plus civil resistance. So a no-a-I social network. I don't know how you're going to do it. maybe with a world coin, maybe with regular old biometrics, maybe with some monetary value at stake, something like that. Plus, you really own your handle and there's algorithmic transparency. You know, they can't change the algorithm on you all the time.

Someone, all those pieces will come together. I think some's going to give that a real shot. Yeah, that's interesting. That would be very good for the world if someone could get that to work. I hope so. Yeah. just describing a thing I want to exist. I agree with you on the tokenized equities, tokenized real world securities.

I think the design space there is maybe the most interesting to me is what are the net new like equity primitives that could exist? Could you tokenize cash flows attributable to, you know, business units or specific products? Could you have rev share tokens that get introduced? Almost like Kickstarter on steroids. We actually get perpetual upside in something that you back early. I think that could be really interesting. You know, speaking, this is a total non-sequitur, but when was last time you bought something on a Kickstarter?

Oh, maybe like when it started, like a year or two after it started. It's been forever. So I, the same. I bought something on a Kickstarter, or I pledged, I guess, for the first time in maybe 15 years. Oh, really? Anything good? It's really dumb. It is a robot sloth that it's not for me, that like clings to your purse. and it, you know, recognizes faces and it kind of looks around, and that's all it does. Really? It's like a slightly more active Furby or Tamadachi or something like that. But it's like got robotics and AI.

Did you actually get it yet? Well, no. I just pledged. You pledged, yeah. I guess it's kind of like you just hope that they send it to you. Someone bought me actually for a wedding present. the something called the coolest cooler. It was just this tricked out cooler.

I got it two years later though. Yeah, wasn't that a scandal around there? There was a big scandal around that. Yeah. Well, I did get it. Deliver. Yeah, they finally, I got a two years, basically on my second year anniversary.

I got it. Yeah, this was a popular Kickstarter became notorious as a major Kickstarter failure with the company shutting down and leaving many backers unfulfilled after raising $13 million. dollars. It had a speaker in it and it had knives and forks. It was a pretty good cooler. It was very, very happy. Did you get yours? I got mine. So you were one of the lucky few. I didn't realize

that. I had no idea it was such a big scandal. I want to say like how do you raise $13 million and not deliver, but we we know how that like that happens all the time. Happens all the time. So it's I'm not actually surprised by that. I mean for a manufacturing company too. that's not that much money probably in the grand scheme of what they were trying to do. Yeah, juice zero is the one that comes to mind. How much did they raise? Oh, they raise a lot. That was like a venture back company, wasn't it? Yeah, that was, oh, they raised 120 million. That was even worse. 120 million. For a juice maker.

Yeah, and it was like, it didn't even make juice out of vegetables or whatever. You had to put in these pre-rendered packets. then it just squeezed the juice out of the packet. Yuck. So it wasn't really even doing anything. Yeah, that was not great. Someone's going to, I think someone could give another run at Juice Arrow. Well, someone could, you know, if you actually had equity in these things or at least a rev share, I think you could really redesign that whole crowdfunding space.

I mean, it's not just Kickstarter now. There's others, right? Oh, there's plenty of them. Yeah, there's a bunch of these things. But, you know, even you could picture. for like people that use Etsy to build small crafts. It's like, hey, all right, I'm going to build out 500 of these, but I need X amount of dollars.

And I'll do a rev share with you. I think the problem with Kickstarter is it gives relatively unseasoned entrepreneurs access to a lot of cash. And I'm going to sound like I'm gatekeeping here. I think it gives unsophisticated founders access to too much cash more than they can handle. because you don't really set the limit on how much you're raising. It's almost like you can raise an arbitrary amount.

And so if your idea really takes off, then now you have to deliver at scale from the gut. That's hard. So it's not how real products work, really. Yeah, I mean, constrained capital is usually actually a good thing, even though it doesn't feel like a good thing. Like it forces you to be prudent and frugal and et cetera. Yeah. Well, I'll let you know if I get my Japanese sloth robot with facial recognition.

All right. So I think that might be it. We go back to watching the Rose Bowl here. But sorry for missing last week. Yeah, I was sick as well. In fact, I'm still sick. So I'm not that flu that like the whole East Coast has. Yeah, I think this is the most people that are sick with the flu ever. Did you know that? I saw that. I saw like everyone in New York City apparently has this flu. And I am one of them. And it's not good. Yeah, very not good. All right, everyone, that is it for the week.

Happy 2026. Have a safe and healthy weekend. And we will see you on Monday.