On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 02/24/22 (Russia and SWIFT, DAO hacker identified, Trudeau backs down) (EP.290)

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

Matt and Nic return for another insane week of news and deals.  Russia invades Ukraine Will Russia get kicked off SWIFT? Are there alternatives to SWIFT? Laura Shin identifies  the alleged DAO hack...er Is Bitcoin's privacy fundamentally broken? Chainalysis demixes Wasabi transactions Was the DAO hacker even guilty of a crime? Should blockchains be private at the base layer? Wyoming introduces a state stablecoin Miami grapples with the fallout of Miamicoin Do turkeys hibernate? Sponsor notes:  Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Learn more at fireblocks.com

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. In this episode is brought to you by Fireblocks. More on that company later in the episode. It's a little bit hard to do a podcast with an actual war going on. Yeah, just a wild time. I mean, just one of these situations that you'll remember for a very long time. Hopefully this turns out all indications are that this is going to be an ongoing and pretty ugly scene. Yeah, it's insane to see a hot war, a kinetic war. happening in Europe. So obviously this is much bigger than crypto, but the obvious question is, what does this
Starting point is 00:00:59 do for cryptocurrency on a macro scale? Is there an impact? What do you think about the market? So I guess I'll just punt that over to you. Well, we've been selling off. Gold rallied briefly. Bitcoin sold off, so so much for that. Obviously, I think the big story here is will Russia look to diversify?
Starting point is 00:01:22 away from the dollar system because they're facing partial exclusion from that as we'll as we'll cover today yeah so I guess we'll get into that right but it's when you say diversify off the dollar I guess you mean as a payments rail they've already been diversifying off of treasuries for some years now yeah that's right so they've been de-dollarizing in terms of the assets in their reserves but their banks are now facing the unenviable task of moving away from the dollar clearing system, trying to find alternatives. They haven't been kicked out of SWIFT yet, but that remains a possibility. So there are sanctions announced today, and in the eyes of some Twitter commentators, they're actually more onerous than getting kicked off SWIFT, although it's kind of hard to
Starting point is 00:02:12 imagine what that would look like. But it looks like 10 Russian financial institutions, including two of the largest banks in the country have effectively been halted from dollar clearing. So it looks like they have a $46 billion FX market in Russia, and 80% of that clears in dollars. And it seems like the two largest banks now can no longer take part in that market structure. So that seems like a big deal to me.
Starting point is 00:02:41 Yeah, and it's not just financial sanctions, actually. Russia won't have access to, high-tech imports from places like the US. So they will have a much reduced ability to get access to integrated circuits and, you know, US hardware. Presumably they could maybe get some of that from China. But yeah, this is a mixture, you know, it's a package deal. But so far it looks like the real nuclear option, which is completely de-platform.
Starting point is 00:03:16 forming Russia banks from the SWIFT system, which is basically all global banks use it, that hasn't occurred. And I suspect that that's because Europe does a lot of business with Russia. They buy a lot of energy from them, especially Germany. Isn't the game theory on that that by taking Russia off of SWIFT, you've effectively marginalized SWIFT and you almost guarantee that there will be a violation? competitor there emerging. There's already a couple that are in the works, but you're almost effectively seeding control of the global monetary system to another poll. Well, yeah, you can sort of only do it once. I mean, the U.S. sort of vaguely threatened
Starting point is 00:04:03 swift exclusion last time with Crimea. I think that was 2014 and didn't follow up on it. And yeah, I mean, if you're deplatforming a large global economy that's pretty integrated, especially in terms of doing business with Europe, if you're excluding them from Swift, then yeah, the dollar network is dramatically worsened. Now, there's not really an alternative, but you'd be hastening the growth of an alternative. I guess all these financial elites here that are being sanctioned, too, It's hard to imagine that this has much of an impact on their day-to-day life. I guess it just means that you can't travel in Europe and in the United States
Starting point is 00:04:47 and use your credit card, it looks like. The interesting dynamic here is the fact that Germany can't afford to stop transacting with Russia realistically because they have an energy dependence on Russia, which has been very well publicized. Other countries in Europe do as well. Italy, Turkey, for instance. certain Baltic states. So because Germany has such a significant dependence,
Starting point is 00:05:17 they would not support most likely a swift exclusion. And so even if the U.S. did want to take that step, I think they would actually face resistance from the EU because the prospect is, you know, Germans not being able to heat their homes. Yeah, and of course you have another, month, month and a half here of winter. So it's a, the chess match here is fully underway. And also food insecurity. I mean, you need energy to make fertilizer, which you need to make food.
Starting point is 00:05:51 We're already seeing inflation driven by energy, which is, you know, the ultimate commodity, which affects everything downstream. And oil's already over $100 a barrel. War is very taxing on oil reserves so expected to increase. I mean, it looks like we're heading for stagflation and a potential food insecurity situation, especially if Russian oil and gas reserves stop being exported to the rest of the world. The consequences could be pretty severe. Well, I'm sure we'll have more on this in the coming weeks. Definitely, it's playing out in real time. So these sanctions are coming in kind of by the minute here. So we'll see. Of course, the Swift one is worth watching.
Starting point is 00:06:38 Why don't we hop into the regularly scheduled program here? So you had another mining miniseries episode here with Bill Spence and Greg Beard from Stronghold Digital. Yeah, this is a pretty fun episode, so very underappreciated firm. Or I would say maybe wrongly maligned mining firm is Stronghold. So they were in this House committee memo on energy. effectively being attacked. They're constantly reference in the press because they, you know, they mine with waste coal and that's sort of believed to be a bad thing. You know, coal is bad. But, you know, I always wanted it to myself, well, what do you mean waste coal? Like, what is
Starting point is 00:07:24 waste coal? What is that even, what is that? Turns out it's like a secondary substance that is a byproduct of coal mining. It's like basically the less rich ores that you pull out of the mine in order to get at the coal seams. And during centuries of mining in places like Pennsylvania, this was just piled up in valleys and just left to rot out and oxidize in gigantic piles. And there's something like 2 million tons of this stuff
Starting point is 00:08:01 in Pennsylvania alone. 2 million or 2 billion Either way it's a lot And there's like Dozens and dozens of these sites Of just huge piles of coal And and some of them are on fire There's like several just
Starting point is 00:08:21 Randomly they're just always on fire Yeah just permanently on fire So just by sitting there They're oxidizing releasing their CO2 And so The state of Pennsylvania actually created a whole bunch of programs and incentives to try and get these piles remediated. It's really, they're too big to just, you know, be put in landfills or anything like that.
Starting point is 00:08:47 And so, as it turns out, there was a technology developed such that you could use the waste coal product in energy generation, even though it's less efficient than regular coal. and because this exists, this waste coal product is able to be put to use. And that's with the full consent of the Pennsylvania authorities. Like they were supportive of this. You know, far from it being considered, you know, environmentally very bad. In fact, the whole point was to remediate this environmental hazard because, you know, basically have heavy metals leaching into the soil.
Starting point is 00:09:26 There's a lot of suspicions that this causes, you know, various chronic illnesses, and the coal itself is oxidizing anyway. And there's just really not many alternatives. So sort of the least worst thing to do is actually to combust it in a controlled, emissions controlled manner and produce energy. And stronghold was put together for this explicit purpose to monetize the energy. And they were able to do it at scale because of Bitcoin. line. They weren't necessarily able to sell it at a higher rate to the grid. And so that's a stronghold story.
Starting point is 00:10:05 It's totally counterintuitive. I didn't know about the notion of waste coal at all, but I found it actually quite poignant. And yeah, it's a really cool story. That is a really cool story. So enjoyed that one. I also sat down with Leo Lusasano from DeCentral Park Capital, just a super thoughtful guy about all things regulation had a really good blog post that we can put in the show notes 22 regulatory predictions for 22 that's just catnip for us you know regulatory predictions yeah the market like we'll dig in on that we love our regulatory so that was fun we've been on a we've been on a pace of pot we've been on an aggressive pace with our podcasts here just a lot of great guess i think it's going to continue just churning them out three a week yeah we may or may not
Starting point is 00:10:54 have an extremely long backlog right now. So we're going to keep them coming. Yeah, we're going to keep them coming. If you want to come on the podcast, we've got a little bit of a backlog right now. But we've got to work through that and we'll see you in May or June. So it's been a very active week of deals. Every week is active. They're always active. This one didn't break that trend. First one up is helium. So this is the decentralized communications network and they raised $200 million from Tiger, FTX, and Malthykoin. Then we have Jambo, which is an African super app. They raised 7.5 million from Delphi, Coinbase, and three arrows.
Starting point is 00:11:35 Jambo, that's a good name. Next one up is Amber Group. Cryptocurrency trading platform raised $200 million from Tamsic, Pantera, Sequoia, China, and others. Then we've got BitPanda, a Austrian crypto brokerage and exchange. They acquired Trustology, which is a crypto custodian. Acquiring these custodians, it's interesting. I think you're going to see more brokerages go into the custody space right now because frankly, it's just not enough custodians, right?
Starting point is 00:12:04 And just having that dependence on a third-party custodian, depending on who you're using, you might not like that dependence. Maybe you want to vertically integrate, have a better product flow. So maybe you'll see more of this. But there's actually not that many custodians out there to buy. Next up we have Securitize, which is a, security token platform, they've acquired Pacific Stock Transfer, which is a transfer agency business. I think you're going to see more of these security token platforms heading in the direction of buying
Starting point is 00:12:36 established businesses that unlock their ability to get something to market versus the other way around potentially of legacy businesses moving into crypto. Maybe it'll be both ways. So the next one up is Zebek. This is a money streaming platform. It's built on Salana. They raised $15 million from Salana Ventures, distributed global, Coinbase, and Alameda. Then we've got Scale Labs that scale with a K. They announced 100 million ecosystem fund, not to be left out. Next one up is Ren Labs. This is a cross-chain bridge project. They raised $7.5 million from Amber Group, multi-coin, block tower, and Cumberland DRW. Speaking of security tokens, the intercontinental exchange has made a strategic investment in T0.
Starting point is 00:13:26 Remember them. Next one up is Teller. This is a decentralized lending protocol. They raised $6.8 million from blockchain capital, Franklin Templeton, Toyota, Bessemer, Upstart, and Signum. Then we've got margin fee, which is a margin lending protocol in Solana. They raised $3 million from multi-coin, Pantara, and Solana Ventures. Next one's also in the Salana ecosystem. It's called Slope Finance.
Starting point is 00:13:51 It's a wallet startup. They raised $8 million from Salana Ventures, Jump, CMS, Circle, and others. A lot of Salana deals. And lastly, we have aligned capital. Their Web 3 infrastructure provider, they raised $34 million from GSR, Altium, and Calvary. Calvary Fund, I think that was. Yeah. Calvary, not Calvary.
Starting point is 00:14:15 So big week of deals. Well, I thought this was going to be the top story of the week, and obviously Russia ended up being the top story of the week. But Laura Shin, who's, of course, the podcast host and columnist, came out with her book this week. And I can't wait to read it. But it made huge headlines because she also came out with an article effectively identifying the Dow hacker, or so she believes. And I'm pretty convinced after reading it. So the revelation was that the Dow hacker is Toby Honish, according to her, who's a third. 36-year-old entrepreneur behind 10x, which was the failed ICO project. This is an absolutely
Starting point is 00:14:54 wild story, and after reading it, I am pretty convinced about her argument. Yeah, it was persuasive, for sure. And Toby's activity on the socials, I think, was pretty telling, just deleting all his old tweets and Reddit posts. And the only trace of things that was left, he had interacted or said a lot about the Dow in the past, which I guess you'd expect from the Dow hacker. But yeah, I mean, they kind of traced it back through, what was, how did they trace it back to Toby?
Starting point is 00:15:35 So what it looks like what happened is he used wasabi. It seems like chain analysis, this is a big part of the takeaway here. So it seems like chain analysis has a way, to decode Wasabi transactions. And so they saw inbound from the hack into Wasabi. On the outbound side of Wasabi, it was sent to a variety of exchanges. One of the exchanges had an employee who apparently tipped her off and said where the funds
Starting point is 00:16:05 went from that exchange. And they went to, I believe it was a grin node that was labeled something like toby.a.i or something. And a variety of his other online. identities were in toby.a.i. As well. So that was one of the ways that it seems like he was identified. Yeah. And I guess it's worth mentioning he had gone from Ethereum Classic, which was obviously the coin that he was left with after the hack because Ethereum forked.
Starting point is 00:16:38 So Ethereum itself undid the hack, right? Right. And so then his only proceeds from the hack were in from the hacker, in Ethereum Classic terms because obviously Ethereum Classic was the chain that resulted from the hack, from the
Starting point is 00:16:58 descent, from a certain portion of the Ethereum community against the rollback. And so he was left with a large amount of Ethereum Classic, which he didn't do much with, but some of it he, I believe, transferred into Bitcoin via shape shift. Right. And then the
Starting point is 00:17:15 Bitcoin, he mixed in Wasabi, apparently that didn't work very well. And I saw a lot of bell-haking about that actually in sort of the Bitcoin privacy community is, was their user error or was it actually Wasabi's own system that allowed it to be de-anonomized? The other odd thing is an exchange employee validating to a journalist, the behavior of one of their clients. I mean, that is like, definitely not kosher. No.
Starting point is 00:17:49 To do that without a warrant or a letter from a judge. Yeah, I mean, definitely you wonder how that's going to play out. I wonder if this person's been identified by his or her employer. Not something you'd want your exchange to be doing is talking to journalists about your account. Yeah. I mean, 10x is an interesting one. It was a totally ridiculous ICO. I mean, you know, you can describe it as failed.
Starting point is 00:18:17 succeeded and raised a lot of money. They failed to launch a product, right? It's still out there trading. They raised something like $80 million, trading at like a $10 million network value, something like that. And I mean, I don't know what they did with the treasury, but yeah, there's plenty of ICOs that failed to deliver a product but did succeed in fundraising and making the founders rich. 10x is one of those. Yeah, so 10x was, I believe, a crypto credit card and it was actually implicated
Starting point is 00:18:51 in the wire card scandal Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah. Yeah, so the wire card fraud, 10X was actually dependent on them and that was one of the reasons why they couldn't really launch a product in the end. So sort of
Starting point is 00:19:07 fraud upon fraud. But yeah, that was one of the bad old days ICOs. I think that was one of the ones that I thought was like especially stupid if we're honest not to you know pile on at this point. But yeah, I mean, there are lots of very stupid ICOs. But that one was quite egregious. When your business is scaling up and your portfolio is growing, you don't want to waste
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Starting point is 00:20:06 Visit on thebrank.link slash fireblocks to learn more. Well, so I guess my question here is what happens now? And is he guilty of a crime? Could he be prosecuted for theft here and under what jurisdiction and what would the pretense of a suit be? Yeah, it's a great question because, I mean, he exploited a DAO. In theory, the members of that DAO, the contributors would have some standing there because it was basically a decentralized venture capital fund. I don't think it was legally incorporated, though, so that's one thing. the whole thing was over five years ago,
Starting point is 00:20:49 so maybe there's some statute that expired. And also the blockchain itself was modified in order to undo the theft. And then his proceeds were on a chain which hadn't existed at the time of the theft. Right. So his proceeds were exclusively on the airdrop chain, which only came to existence as a consequence of his theft.
Starting point is 00:21:15 it's like I don't know what the heck the analogy is here it's like it's like you're able to steal Apple stock certificates from someone and they manage to steal them back but you managed to get away with like a clone
Starting point is 00:21:32 like a copy-based version of Apple and that's what you were left with I mean is that a crime I don't know someone will go after him I guess but it's not going to be the easiest case to be made I mean he could also have the argument that people were saying at the time, which is just, this is what the code said, and I just did what the code said you could do.
Starting point is 00:21:52 Well, I mean, I don't think that is a functional defense. I mean, that's any exploit of any smart contract. You're just, you know, following what the code permits you to do. And that's not a sufficient defense. But, yeah, this is a really weird case because, I mean, he's certainly, you know, engaged and I guess theft at the time, but the theft was undone. But I guess that doesn't mean that no crime occurred. It's like if you steal someone's wallet and then someone steals the wallet from you and gives it back to them,
Starting point is 00:22:28 that's still crime. Yeah, I think so. I guess I need to look it up. Now, what about the wasabi angle here? Do you think a lot of people are just panicking if there've been heavy wasabi users here? It seems like chanalysis was all over this. Yeah, this is, I guess, troublesome from a privacy perspective we've been talking about. Bitcoin's privacy shortcomings or perception of shortcomings have been talked about a lot recently
Starting point is 00:22:59 with obviously this Canadian trucker drama, which we should touch on. But yeah, it's a little troubling, I think, that apparently Wasabi is highly imperfect and can be demixed even if there is no egregious user error. So the suspicion was that he had made a mistake, but it appears that that is actually not the case, that it was a protocol side, you know, the protocol itself feature of the protocol that allowed chain analysis to demix. Absolutely incredible.
Starting point is 00:23:33 So this is a shock to me. I think I sort of was under the impression. Russian that Bitcoin's privacy was better than it maybe is. Yeah, I wonder what this does just longer term to some of these wallet-based privacy projects that are building on Bitcoin. I mean, you'd have to be kind of crazy to use these if you're a criminal. Yeah, I always thought, I always liked the model of the auditable L1 with privacy built on top, whether it's the tornado cash on ETH or the wasabi on Bitcoin,
Starting point is 00:24:11 as opposed to the private by default L1. Right, because you can't audit. Yeah, I think that tradeoffs in terms of auditability are unappetizing, right? It's hard or almost impossible to know if there's been an inflation bug on one of these totally confidential L1s. Yeah. That doesn't mean that I'm against privacy. It's just that I think the best model is probably one where you have the transparent L1 and some sort of mixing pool or some shielded pool or some, you know, ZK snarkified thing on top. But it appears that the tools we have right now are very inferior. Yeah, it seems like that, especially, and maybe this is a good transnational.
Starting point is 00:25:06 to some of the deplatformings that continue to happen in Canada. Did you read this DHH post coming around to non-sovereign money? He said, I was wrong. We need crypto. Basically because he saw everything that's happening up in Canada. Yeah, I think it was a real kind of orange-pilling event for a lot of skeptics because they realized, wow, mass scale financial deplatforming or using finance as a, tool of oppression against your own citizens it can happen in the West too doesn't just happen in
Starting point is 00:25:41 foreign countries i think it did wake a lot of people up the interesting thing is we were complaining about this for the last week and then Trudeau went ahead and repealed or uh avoided the emergency act right that he'd used to justify all this so basically the Canadian government backed down yeah they backed down but the fact that they went so far is really alarming i think Yeah, I mean, there were two acts. One of them was the General Emergency Act and one order went much further. And that was the thing that permissioned all of the aggressive, you know, financial deplatforming and asset seizures. It's not clear whether it's the latter that has been undone or just the former. But yeah, for what it's worth, the Canadian government did back down a little bit. But, uh, Yeah, they doesn't undo the fact that they engaged in sort of mass scale financial sanctions on a largely extrajudicial basis with no due process against their own citizens. Right.
Starting point is 00:26:51 I saw some of the Zcash crew really taking victory laps here around the auditability of Bitcoin, both in terms of the 10x Dow story, but also in terms of the sanctioning on the addresses and the fact that they're trying to de-anonomize some of the contributors to the trucker protests that used Bitcoin and saying the Zcash is a better model. And maybe it is, but you also have to remember that Zcash has had this nasty kind of auditability bug thing that happened
Starting point is 00:27:19 and you actually don't know for sure how many Zcash there are in circulation. So there's pros and cons to each side here. Yeah. And I mean, it's also, you know, what did Zcash do? You know, did Zcash, save the, you know, the Canadian truckers? I don't think so. So how can you take a victory lap when
Starting point is 00:27:40 you haven't done anything, you know, you haven't really proven that your system is superior? Like, it's one thing to debate theoretically the privacy assurances. It's another thing to build a whole suite of technologies that allows individuals to have financial sovereignty. Bitcoin clearly didn't do a good job of that, not just with the privacy, but also because it was very dependent on centralized intermediaries because there weren't good tools for crowdfunding, because there weren't good protocols around like distribution, because they weren't robust P2P marketplaces. So Bitcoin didn't pass the test with flying colors. Zcash basically wasn't president. It wasn't there. It's not just about on-chain privacy. It's about the last mile.
Starting point is 00:28:30 It's about the on and the off-ramps. It's about crowdfunding. tools. Like there's a whole suite of things that needs to exist for people to use Bitcoin in a self-sovereign way. A whole suite. And that was my disappointment. You know, I said some, I guess, jaded things about it, and never got a lot of people got upset with me. But that was my disappointment was the whole ecosystem of tools that would allow, you know, the truckers or anyone else to use Bitcoin in a self-sovereign way for outsiders or newcomers who don't know crypto very well, those tools are underdeveloped and they don't exist.
Starting point is 00:29:14 Now, just on-chain privacy alone doesn't fix that. That's like one pretty small piece of the puzzle. Yeah, all the Bitcoin people were pretty upset at you for your stance on that. But I think it's the right point is that it's an under-allocated infrastructure category there in terms of payment processing for cryptocurrencies, and there needs to be more time and attention spent on it, especially as this just becomes a bigger political issue. I mean, The Intercept had another article about cryptocurrency this week,
Starting point is 00:29:42 talking about how crypto in Afghanistan is being used to side-step sanctions, and, of course, the banks are failing, the Taliban is now back in power. And so cryptocurrency and just non-sovereign value stores becoming more pervasive, but the tooling and the product experiences for these things are definitely suboptim. Yeah, then that was the source of my kind of disillusionment, or at least we have to do better, is that. Is that the last mile is challenging. Spending Bitcoin is challenging. Getting it into the fiat economy is difficult.
Starting point is 00:30:18 And what has mainly been financed in the crypto space is a lot of things that aren't very addressable to that. or involve, you know, esoteric financial derivatives and complex derivatives. So that was, you know, there's also a place for that, obviously. But limited amounts have been done in terms of, you know, basic tools that let regular folks use this stuff in an everyday context. Well, I guess people complain about this in every industry, wanting flying cars and getting 140,000. characters. I guess that's a symptom of just... That's our version of that. Yeah. That's how this works, I suppose. If only we were, you know, if only we had the resources to do something about it. Yeah. Well, if you're working on a DGEN gambling app, let us know. Or no, we're on the other one.
Starting point is 00:31:16 Yeah, I think we have enough of those. Yeah. All right. Well, let's move on to the next story. So NXO, which is the crypto lender, they have stopped paying interest to U.S. customers. I guess this seems like a reaction to the SEC settlement of BlockFi here. I think you'll see more of these companies in that category pulling back from serving the U.S. customers with the interest accounts. Yeah, certainly not surprising. And a bit of a reckoning here for the centralized lenders. And then another story that I found was kind of interesting. We didn't talk about it last week, but last Thursday at the Hatch Foundation, Cynthia Lummes suggested that the U.S. Federal Reserve should be evaluating whether or not they should buy Bitcoin and said that they should. So yeah,
Starting point is 00:32:00 I think they should too. Yeah, me too. Interesting Wyoming-related story. There's currently a bill that has progressed through committee in Wyoming legislature and will apparently be brought to a vote regarding Wyoming itself creating a state stable coin. So keep an eye on that. We might be getting stable coins at the state level. A state stable coin? That's pretty awesome. How about a Massachusetts one? I think Warren would shut that thing down in a heartbeat though. She's not a fan of stable coins as we know. We would launch that and then Stephen Lynch and Warren they would be anti. Yeah, two of the primary antagonists of stable coins really. You could get a Florida one off the ground, I bet. Well, the Florida local authorities is sort of grappling with a fallout of the Miami coin.
Starting point is 00:32:55 fiasco. Oh, is that still going on? Yeah, which was very predictable, honestly. So the Miami, you know, various city officials sort of implicitly endorsed Miami coin. And there were like trucks driving around here, advertising it saying like, oh, Miami coin has donated X amount to the city. And then Miami coin then proceeded to sell off by like 90%. And people are really upset that, you know, the city of Miami lent its de facto support to this coin, which doesn't appear to have a fundamental basis for its valuation. And they did so in a cynical way because they stood to benefit from its appreciation. And so there's a bit of a reckoning over that now.
Starting point is 00:33:44 Okay. So is that going to put a pause on all the crypto goodwill down there? Yeah, I might put a small dent in it. But, you know, we're weathering the storm. down here, the crypto community, we're going strong. So we're going to make it through. Well, speaking of storms, we're getting ready for like a 12-inch snowstorm here, it looks like. And a lot of people have been asking if my cousin's going to be contracted.
Starting point is 00:34:08 And the answer is no. He will not be on the shovel duty. I shovel my own driveway. I just happened to be out of town when he did a horrible job. So a lot of people were asking about that. Taking your shoveling fade into your own hands. Yeah, I mean, I shovel my own driveway. It happened to be gone.
Starting point is 00:34:25 He did a terrible, terrible job on the driveway. I hope your cousin's not a listener of the show. I don't think he listens. It's getting blown up on here. Yeah, you know, a lot of people are asking. I got some more questions about the turkey situation too. They're still around, but it's pretty cold. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:34:45 I think they're kind of hiding out somewhere. What did Turkey's doing in wintertime? They don't hibernate. And I have been kind of. kind of one of these people that is not always right about what type of animals hibernate. I used to think that deer hibernated because, you know, like, where they're, apparently they're fine. They just kind of walk around in the three feet of snow, which is shocking. It can't be very comfortable. But turkeys, I don't think there's, I don't believe any birds hibernate.
Starting point is 00:35:12 Well, turkeys, I know don't hibernate, but I was talking about the deer. Right. But, yeah, I would say hibernation pretty much off the table for birds. No. And so just to establish that. Yeah, and these turkeys, you know, they cannot fly, like, house to house. They can't fly south. Like, these are not Key West turkeys. They're not flying south to Mexico for the winter. No. So I think, I mean, I think these things are like living in trees, basically.
Starting point is 00:35:39 Wow. Well, maybe some turkey experts can weigh in here. Like, what do they do when it gets cold? I don't know. The deer thing was always just perplexing to me. It's like these poor deer, they must just be freezing. Yeah, I would be chilly if I was a New England deer. It's like not every town has caves.
Starting point is 00:36:00 It's like there's not a lot of shelter out there. I know. Being a wild animal is pretty tough. Yeah. You know, like live inside somewhere. Come on. Well, so that's your nature lesson for the week. I think that might be it.
Starting point is 00:36:15 That was talking nature. We'll be back on Monday. Another good podcast coming out on Monday. Okay, we'll see you then. All right. safe and healthy weekend.

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