On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 04/03/25 (Circle S1, Tariffs, Galaxy settles, BitMEX pardons) (EP.609)

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  What's the deal with the tariffs? Are the tariffs 4D chess? STABLE Act advances from committee Galaxy settles with the NYAG for touting Luna Trump pardons the BitMEX founders Coinlist returns to the US FDUSD has a depeg amidst Justin Sun drama Fidelity launches a no-fee crypto IRA product Larry Fink is bullish bitcoin Content mentioned: AI 2027, by Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean

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 is 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 to 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 a Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Recording this one late on a Thursday. This is dedication to the podcast in crowds. right here. It's been a pretty interesting week. It seems like the world's in flames right now with this tariff situation. Do people listen to On the Brink for our tariff takes? Do we have good tariff takes? I don't know if we're renowned experts on tariffs. We definitely are not, but I think we

have to address it. What's the deal with these penguin islands, the herd and McDonald Islands, which have had a tariff imposed on them, 10%. These guys are getting smoked, these Antarctica penguins. Are there people on these islands? Completely uninhabited. But they have tariffs. It's an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. I'd never heard of them. They actually look pretty nice.

Like I'm trying to visit this place now. It's like a volcano. So it's completely uninhabited. You're telling me it doesn't even have a house on it. There appear to be no buildings or structures of any sort, but there's a really cool volcano. know there's what looks like glaciers. There are lots of penguins as far as I can tell.

I mean, it looks great. There's seals as well. Maybe the seals were exporting. Seals have been, yeah, tariffed. Tariffed those seals. How did your St. Helena Island do in the tariff game? That's actually a great question. Is there a list somewhere?

There was a big list. Yeah, there was a Bolton board list. I mean, that's a part of the United Kingdom. Okay. So it's in the UK tariffs. Lesotho was hardest hit with 50%. Kind of tough one. I mean, they were already kind of up against it, to be honest.

Yeah, they were having a hard time as it was. So S&P 500 today, which is Thursday, closed down 4.84%, it looks like. Bitcoin, not as much, actually. Yeah, stocks, large cap tech got absolutely shredded. Bitcoin, yeah. More or less flat, actually, on Bitcoin. So what does that tell you? We just got to take our wins when we can get them, you know?

My feeling on that is maybe Sailor is active and maybe GameStop is active because it seems like Bitcoin should have sold off a lot more, just as a general risk on asset. There has to be something, there has to be some kind of like hidden bid in the Bitcoin market for that to make sense. I did find the list. The UK is at 10%. It's actually gone off easy.

The Falkland Islands, which is another British territory that's kind of to the west of St. Tolina. They got 40% and they don't produce anything. They must tariff us really bad, huh? There's only like 300 people that live there. Well, they should really change their policy. They better alter their trade arrangement with the U.S., that's for sure. How many people have read the art of the deal and just, you know,

pick up the phone and make a phone call might be the play for the Falcline Islands right now? so all right so here's the question matt is this part of some 4d underwater chess thing where we're gonna we're crushing rates so we get to refinance our debt more cheaply or we expect all these countries to negotiate and then actually all the tariffs are going to go away is it 4d chess or is it 1d checkers where it's actually just a very bad, huge blunder. Well, I'm more inclined to say it's not 4D chess, to be honest with you, but I could see how people would be saying that. It seems to me like it's dancing on a razor's edge here.

The thing is, Trump has been saying how much he likes terrorists for 40 years. That's right. Yeah, there's a lot of YouTube videos of him on talk shows in the 80s talking about. He is what he says he is. He likes the tariffs. So why did he not do it in his first term? He had some tariffs, but not really a lot. There were some tariffs.

Every economist on the planet doesn't like tariffs, every single one. You know what the general vibe in crypto is? Just when we were getting our stuff together, just when the SEC was coming around, we're getting market structure bill, we have to have a macro meltdown. Has the president ever done something that was panned by every single economist on the planet before? What do you think the Smoot-Hawley tariffs were like in the age? So I was actually looking into that because that was kind of after the stock market crash, was it 29? The Smoot-Hawley tariffs were, I think, in 30.

And then we had the Great Depression, so certainly didn't help. But it was in response to... to actually kind of, it was like a democratic thing, like the people wanted the tariffs. They wanted to protect American farmers. And so that was the justification. It was a populist thing. It was to protect local industry, agriculture, et cetera. And it totally backfired and it made the Great Depression worse.

But this is a little different because not that many people were clamoring for tariffs. No, not a lot of people at all. A lot of people thought that this was just a stunt, really. Yeah. I mean, I don't think we're going to reindustrialize in the way that people want it to happen, which is to say bring back a lot of sort of like working class jobs, like high paying. Because I do think we're going to reindustrialize, but it's just going to be done with AI and robots. That's the thing, right? It's going to be a lot of robots, which makes you sound like a crazy person in some circles. But that is talking about this this morning with a portfolio company CEO who thinks that a lot of maintenance tasks over the next. 10 years will be automated by robots.

I mean, I 100% believe manufacturing will return to the U.S. Because we have, you know, kind of a more abundant energy situation, not as much as China, but it's a lot. AI is going to make manufacturing cheaper and easier and we're going to be able to do it more bespoke. So I completely believe we're going to have manufacturing. I just don't think it's going to produce this glut of jobs. Quite the contrary, I think AI is going to totally destroy jobs.

tariffs are not. I don't see this golden age resurgence of our industrial sector coming. Yeah, I think people really underestimate how impactful this AI thing is going to be. You were just showing me some charts you're building for a presentation on stable coins. And I'm looking at these charts. I'm thinking I would have spent two days building these charts when I was a first year consultant out of undergrad. Yeah, I one shot it. So one prompt, a fully functioning, dynamic. chart showing cross-border flows

overlaid against a world map that's like an advanced programming task that's not easy no that was one prompt to take 10 seconds that's insane so like how many business analysts are going to be in the three years from now in the McKinsey first year class how many business analysts do they need

relative to how many they have this year a lot fewer I would think I've done data projects like that before that kind of data viz and it would have taken me like six to eight hours and now it's 15 seconds. Yeah, so I think you're right. I mean, that's, of course, highly deflationary. There is a new AI manifesto that came out as well from an ex-opening I researcher just today called AI 27.

So do you remember that that one called situational awareness from Leopold Ashenbrenner? Yes, I do. Yeah, that was a good one. He talks about a trillion dollar cluster. Yeah. And everyone read it, actually. like even Ivanka Trump read it. And now there's a new one of these.

And it's also apocalyptic. What's the TLDR? Actually, I haven't finished. It's like interactive. You can like pick, you get to like pick certain paths. I'm going to link it in the show notes. It's very well done.

But I'm guessing at the end, the robots turn us all into Gregoo and we all die. Huh. Okay. Good. A lot of uplifting stuff today. You know, we got members of,

the team over here reading this book called Nuclear War by Annie Jacobson. So I'm like, all right, I got to read it. Everyone else in the office is reading it here in Boston. Really? So I read it. This is what I miss out. I don't get the water cooler chatter. The camaraderie. No, it's just a bunch of dorks in an office talking about nuclear war. And, uh, what's the, what's the conclusion? It's not good. I won't ruin the end for you. But it, you know, think about sending humanity back to the caveman era, basically. What sounds like the end is in the title of the book. Yeah, but you kind of start with saying, okay, well, maybe this is just a contain blast and maybe you can, you know, rebuild. Not as optimistic.

That author was pretty pessimistic on it. So I think the key thing is there we need to not start a nuclear war. What does it take away? There was kind of one opportunity to do that, which was in the 40s and 50s when we had, here's something I puzzle about. This is kind of like a dangerous topic, if we're honest. during the Korean War we had nuclear weapons and China did not

and China took the side of North Korea right you remember right we did not use nuclear weapons against them yeah MacArthur MacArthur wanted to I believe and he was fired over that right I think right yeah that was I think a mistake

am I allowed to say that is that allowed I think that's outside the Overton window of opinions but I mean do you think that no one else was going to develop them. Well, but China wouldn't have been able to because we would have, you know, you know what I mean?

All right. Hot take. That was a hot take. A little hot on that take. Just been thinking about that recently. Well, it's sort of a problem. This book ends. I won't ruin the ending too, too much,

but you get the gist of it. But they bring up, what's that site in Turkey? Go-Blettepe, I think. Go Beckley. Tepe. Okay. And it's this ancient ruin that was found. It's an archaeologist, you know, dig basically going on in Turkey,

uh, Gobeckli Tepe, I guess. And it's, the significance of it is because it shows that humanity existed, um, much before, uh, we thought,

basically. So there's basically, it looks like it's some sort of a meeting place and it is forced a lot of these, um, you know, historians to go back and think, maybe we actually had pretty civilized society a lot longer ago than we think.

How much, how far back is it? It was inhabited in 9,500 BCE. So this is a long, long time ago. But the theory would be, has humanity got to a certain place in the past and had just staggeringly bad either natural disasters or who knows, maybe nuclear war, you know, 10,000 years ago. So is this good or bad? Because it kind of means we idled along pre-civilized, kind of, what's it, is it, Neolithic era?

Paleolithic. So we were in the Neolithic era. That was the Neolithic era, I think. We had civilization, but it took us another 5,000 years. 10,000 years. When did civilization begin? You know, 2000 BC? 3,000?

Now we're outside of my zone. I can tell you. We're exposing ourselves. I didn't study that. So that kind of means that we advanced way slower than we had previously thought. Well, the thought experiment is almost if you have a nuclear war and you have, you know, I don't know, a million people left on planet Earth, who are going to be those people that you rebuilt society with? Those are going to be the most down and rough and tumble people on planet Earth that can survive something like that.

And, you know, I don't think you're going to have, like, physicists survive it. all you need is one instance of the latest AI model and it can tell you how to rebuild everything from scratch and it's in like one gigabyte of data. That's true actually. So you need one hard drive. Yeah. How cool is that?

That is a good thought experiment. We should start planting those on the moon and Mars and places like that. The problem is you have to actually do it though. You have to like reinvent electricity from scratch and all that stuff. That's true. Like even if you had the encyclopedia there with you, I don't know if I could invent a steam engine on my own. No. No.

No. I mean, you'd be hard pressed to build yourself a cup. Yeah, I mean, you need clay and a kiln and other such things. You need to fire the clay. How do you do that? Couldn't tell you. All right. So we did tariffs, nuclear war and, you know, rebuilding society.

13 minutes in We'll talk about some crypto Yeah so we did have one podcast this week Alexi Zamyatim in our portfolio of course Build on Bitcoin Bob Discussing the state of the art In Bitcoin rollups Very optimistic takes from Alexi actually

He basically believes that Bitcoin rollups will be at parity With Ethereum rollups Early next year In terms of being quote stage one That's pretty awesome. Alexi's great. The second time on the podcast, I think, right? Yeah, you know, explaining roll-ups is one of those things that's not a lot of people can do. Almost no one, in fact.

Yeah, you have to reason by analogy of some of this stuff. And then when you make comparisons to, okay, it's kind of like ACH on top of Fedwire, a lot of people just don't understand that either. No, definitely not. So listen to the episode, Alexi does it better than we could. All right, let's hop into some deals. A big one here in the castle. Island portfolio, Felix Pago, which is a stable coin remittance company. They raised $75 million in a series B. It was led by QED investors, participation from Castle Island, Manashi's Switch Ventures.

One of the most exciting companies we've ever been involved in here, just growing like crazy. So that's the Felix team. Can't say enough good things about this team, Miami Company. Just making ordinary people's lives better with stable coins. And you don't have to know anything about crypto to use. the app. It's a WhatsApp interface with a chat bot. And the whole thing just settles on stablecoins the back end and makes life cheaper and better for anyone sending remittance. So just amazing execution

from that team. Next one up is Ambient. This is a decentralized AI network. They raise $7 million from Delphi Digital, A16Z, and Amber Group. Then you have Cambrian network. That's an AI agent protocol. There is 5.9 million from blockchain builders fund, AI 16, X, CSX? What's happening there? What's that? I think that's A16Z. I don't know.

This is A16X. Is there a new like sister fund there? From blockchain builders fund, AI16Z, CSX and others. Then we have Mohagen. This is a decentralized generative AI platform. There is $5 million from Maelstrom and AI 16. X. CSX is what we got to figure out what this is.

What's happening with the newsletter? This is my pick for the name of the week, Blocktipus. They're a decentralized app development platform. They raise one million from Hivemind, tech stars and Brevin Howard. Blocktipus. I like that one.

That's a good one. Next one up is called Abound. This is an India-focused remittance platform that raise $14 million from the Near Foundation, Circle Ventures, and Times Internet. Then we have momentum. That's a decentralized exchange on sui. They raise $5 million from Vars Capital and Coinbase ventures.

The last one up is Republic. This is the investment platform. They acquired INX Digital, the Canadian crypto trading platform. I believe they have a security token exchange too, right? Yeah. For $60 million. So big news this week, a lot of news actually, Circle, filed their S-1. Did they file one back in the day when they were planning to SPAC as well?

I don't know. I don't know if that was an S-1 or not, but it possibly. So they have an S-1-S-1. Yeah. Now, they had $1.7 billion of revenue in 2024, 99% of which was attributable to interests, interest on the reserves. The revenue was up 16% year every year as the supply expanded.

I think it's an all-time high, but the net income was down 42% year-over-year due to an increase in distribution costs, aka yield-sharing agreements. and then also a strategic partnership with Binance. Yeah, this was a, so do you remember a few weeks ago we did this presentation to some folks in our network and we're doing almost a flashback to the MIT Bitcoin Expo in 2015 and just doing the exercise of looking at what people were saying back then about Bitcoin in this whole industry.

And Jeremy Aller did a speech at that conference. And it's remarkable how Circle looks today very much. much like how he described it to be back in 2015 before stable coins existed. Initially, he was saying he thought that there would be Fiat payments on Bitcoin. On Bitcoin, which, you know, to be fair, Bitcoin was the only game in town back then. This was before Ethereum. You did have like master coin and, you know, name coin and, you know, fry coin or whatever. It could happen too.

It could come truly full circle if we see USDA deployed on a modern roll upon Bitcoin. And that would be the real full circle moment. Yeah, I think that'll happen. But it's kind of just remarkable. You look back on some of these businesses that were started back in the 2015 time period. And a lot of them that proposed to use Bitcoin as the payment mechanism would have worked great with stable coins. You think about all these remittance companies into the Philippines back in 2015. Even some of these merchant settlement companies that got started didn't ultimately work.

It was just they needed a faster blockchain than they needed dollars. Yeah, it's all about. timing, you know, and to Jeremy's credit, he hung around and pivoted and some bumps in the road, for sure, with some of the acquisitions there, but they made it out the other side. Credit to them. Yeah, you have to, I think Jeremy Miller is just one of the all-time great entrepreneurs, and certainly one of the best of all time in the crypto sector. So excited to see where this goes with Circle. All right. Next one up, the DTCC. This is, of course, the primary clearing and settlement infrastructure in the United States,

consortium owned, they announced the upcoming launch of a blockchain-based platform for tokenized collateral management. They would be the logical player to do some of this, so that makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like they'd been piloting blockchain stuff

for a decade now. That's not an exaggeration. They have been piloted stuff for a decade. I think they had an Ex-Oni pilot at one point. It might have even been in production. I think digital asset holdings was in there for a while. They've done a bunch of stuff at the DTCC. Also in Stable Coins, the House Financial Services Committee

has advanced the Stable Bill out of Committee, 32 to 17. And last month, the Senate Banking Committee advanced the Genius Bill, which is the Senate counterpart to the House bill. So Congress will have to compromise between the two bills and in particular, I guess, decide on a treatment of foreign issuers like Tether. So we're kind of making progress on this could be the first ever pro-crypto piece of legislation

This seems like it's in a pretty good spot actually So get voted out of committee with some good bipartisan support there It's feeling to me like this is heading towards a vote Do you think when they combine the bills they're going to call it the stable genius? Yes, I actually do That is intensely amusing if they do that very stable genius even That would be incredible. All right.

So here's a story. Galaxy Digital. They have settled with the New York Attorney General's office for $200 million. This is a Martin Act case, which is specific to the state of New York. It almost allows the state of New York to act like the SEC, it looks like, in a lot of ways. So it's a $200 million fine about the company's role in promoting Luna. This Luna, of course, was just the straw that broke the case. Hamel's back in the credit market. So Luna was the not so stable, stable coin. Everything got

levered up to Luna. All the lending companies collapsed, three arrows went down on Luna. And basically what they're saying here in this settlement, it's, you know, I guess it's not a charging document as much as it's just allegations that were admitted by Galaxy that CEO Mike Novigrots was touting this, you know, going on TV and tweeting about it while simultaneously selling it. So at its peak, Luna was worth $40 billion, went to basically nothing. What do you make of this? Yeah, I read it. It's kind of tough reading, to be honest with you. I think NIAG, is it NIAG? Yeah, they've sort of got them dead to rights on this. I mean, there's nothing wrong with buying something and then selling something that later collapses.

but I guess in New York, there's something wrong with selling it whilst you're simultaneously touting it to a mass audience. I think that would be something that would be wrong not only in New York, but in every state in the great country of the United States of America. But legally, it's wrong in New York. In other states, it may not be not legal advice. I don't know. I guess New York's harsher. Is this probably the, you know, is this the worst charging document? I don't even know what we call this document because I guess there's not just charges because they admitted they're paying the fine 200 million dollars here over what three years or something but this is like worse than almost as bad as the FTX charging document I mean you just can't do that and there's many good people that work a galaxy and they do excellent work but you just can't sell the thing while publicly promoting it also you shouldn't do that not much more we

can say about that. That's a tough one. But that one, that happened. So the three founders of Bitmex were pardoned by President Trump. I think they had served time not in prison for the BSA violation. They'd served house arrest, something like that, right? Yeah, I think that's right. I'm not sure there's actually prison time associated with this.

And yeah, these Bank of Secrecy Act violations, I guess there was, you know, like OFAC issues on the point. platform, right? They hit a lot some Iranian people to trade on the platform. Honestly, I'm fine with it. I know people were complaining about it. I think it's fine. They didn't lose anyone's money. They didn't commit fraud. They didn't steal anyone's money. They just violated the BSA. Yeah, this one, I mean, I guess this got a bunch of mainstream attention, but these guys were not known to be bad actors. And like you said, they weren't ever deemed to be frauds. They had a

bad compliance program. Hard to argue that. I mean, really bad compliance. I mean, Bitmix played a very important role in the early history of Bitcoin. That's where the perpetual swap was invented. Arthur went along to basically invent Athena also. Yeah, basically. Yeah. So I got a lot of good things to say about these guys. It's a nuanced thing, right? I mean, so the mainstream press here is not doing crypto any favors. And I guess they didn't like it. you know, Trump and his orbit doing all these projects probably doesn't help with that. But mainstream press didn't like it, but I didn't have much of an issue with this one myself. Next one up is Coinless.

So this is the token launch platform. They're coming back to the U.S. So they announced that they're coming back. They're doing an upcoming token sale with double zero protocol, which is a distributed fiber network. So they'll allow accredited investors in the U.S. to participate basically in ICO format. I see I get a lot of you know people dunk on ICOs I actually did a podcast a couple days ago with someone we talked about some of the good things that came out of the ICO era it wasn't all bad but democratizing access to individuals to be able to participate in some of these things

that was overall a good thing and Coinlist has a good way to do this you know you have to be accredited you have to KYC on there have to acknowledge all the risks so it's kind of a it's like Angel List right that's sort of the it was born out of Angel List too I think historically the SEC kind of really did US investors dirty because historically a lot of the coin list ICO or the coinless offerings did tremendously well yeah salana was on that platform if I remember correctly so file coin welcome back coin list I mean yeah that's that's a good good outcome there I mean that's you look at some of the signs that the US is getting healthier from an ecosystem perspective in a regulatory perspective coinless coming back is a really good thing the ICO in of itself

that's just kind of a shell of a concept. I mean, really it's about is this offering being made to unsophisticated, are there proper disclosures? I mean, hopefully that's what we would see in the Market Structure Act. Yeah, definitely. Some of that stuff.

Coinless now has competition from Echo. That's turning into, this is going to be a bona fide category, right? And so Coinless was the first mover. Echo seems to be. There's another one called Legion as well. Legion, yeah. Yeah.

There's a bunch of these, yeah. This kind of flown to the radar Fidelity, they launched a zero-fee crypto IRA to allow U.S. investors to add direct non-ETF-based crypto exposure to their retirement portfolios, starting with BTC, ETH, and LTC. That is going to be a big deal. There's going to be a lot of people that use that. It's going to be a lot of AUM there. And owning it direct, I think, is really cool. Yeah, direct, no fee. Pretty cool. We'll see if a certain senator from Massachusetts. has any problems with that. Do you think she has a fidelity account? Probably.

Most people in Massachusetts do. I guess most people in the U.S. do at this point. So there was... She probably wouldn't use crypto products, is my guess. Yeah, that would be amazing if she did. There was a bit of incomprehensible, as these things always are with Justin's son scandal around FDUSD. So I don't understand this,

because I thought that Justin Sun was involved in first, digital but maybe I'm just hallucinating or something what the heck is first digital is just a stable coin that Justin's son invented or something I thought that a lot of the supply was coming from binae I thought FD USDA had to deal with finance and it was meant to be the successor to be usd but maybe I'm getting mixed up or something anyway so Justin Sun alleged that it was uh insolvent and I guess some evidence came out in support of that. This is a Hong Kong regulated stable coin with a kind of a proof of reserve element to it.

So I don't understand how it could not have the reserves. I kind of have just this mental thing where every time I hear a story about Justin's son, I just tune out. So it has depegged and I think it's still trading below peg. Yeah, I don't know, guys, just use credible stable coins. I think that's the lesson here. That's the lesson. All right, in other news this week, the Senate Banking Committee,

they voted 13 to 11 along party lines to advance the nominations of Paul Atkins to be the head of the SEC and Jonathan Gould to be the controller of the currency. So on to a full Senate vote for these two, which I'd imagine would probably just go along party lines as well. Yeah, but I think it'll go smoothly. Gould is being slept on here. I mean, OCC is an important job, and he is very good. So that's an exciting one.

Yeah, I think Atkins appears to be very good, too. So it seems like we've got some quite competent people coming in here, hopefully. Did you read this Larry Fink letter? No, but it seems like he likes Bitcoin. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So I'll just read a couple of excerpts. So here's one on the U.S. dollars reserve status. Quote, if the U.S. doesn't get its debt under control, if deficits keep ballooning,

America risks losing that position to digital assets like Bitcoin. What a statement. Can you imagine Larry Fink saying that like five years ago? I mean, he was saying basically the complete exact opposite of that a few years ago. He was saying that Bitcoin was just for, like, what was his quote, just for criminals or something back in 2017 and he has come to the point of saying that the U.S. is going to lose its reserve status to Bitcoin.

Yeah, I mean, you kind of don't want a default to happen. It's like a Pyrrhic victory. Definitely not, but... Yeah, even for the sake of Bitcoin, I'm not cheering. I'm not cheering for a default. No. But for him to put that out there, there is no stronger endorsement for an asset.

than that. And then he talks about tokenization. So he says, quote, if Swift is the postal surface, tokenization is email itself. Assets move directly and instantly, sidestepping intermediaries. Every stock, every bond, every fund, every asset can be tokenized. If they are, it will revolutionize investing. That's again, pretty powerful stuff from Larry Fink. People were saying this in 2017, but I kind of believe it now. I mean, people were definitely saying this. But people were saying this who didn't know anything about financial services were saying this, right? Like you would say this in 2017 and it'd be like, all right, buddy, like, how's a secondary trading landscape going to work?

But Larry Fink is here pushing a market structure bill. I was a big tokenization skeptic. I'll tell you that. Yeah, I was, I mean, the problem is just a lot of complexity, right? Like, it doesn't work if you don't get a regulatory framework to make it work. So, of course, it's technically possible. But to sell this big vision here, that's going to get a lot of people's attention. Yeah.

Look, we need all the help we can get right now. So I'm glad we got Larry Fink on our side. I don't know. I think we're in a good spot here. But, you know, maybe the macro is a little dicey. I think we overshot here on the pullback? I mean, dicey to say the least, you know, we have, God knows where the tariffs are going to go. we're getting stag-flationary economic data.

AI is happening. It's going to take all the jobs. Maybe that's the bright side. It's like if, well, if the AI apocalypse is happening three to five years, we don't need to worry about any of this stuff. Yeah, well, that's a bright note. Or singularity. So it could be apocalypse or singularity where we enter this era of abundance post-scarcity era.

Macro-Data won't matter either. What are you going to do all day if you're not chasing deals? Tweet, I think. Just tweet, yeah. You can still tweet in the AI singularity era. You could, yeah. The problem is AIs will be better at tweeting also. Yeah, where's the fun in that?

So I have been puzzling recently over how you design a social network such that it's just humans. And because there's too much AI slop on my feed already as it is. And it's kind of very hard to figure out how you would do that. Proof of humanity type of a thing. You don't think you could do that with some sort of a retina scan or something like that. Yeah, so WorldCoin, right? But, you know, you could just scan your eyes and then have the AI do the posting for you, you know? Yeah, once you're logged into the session.

I guess that is right. So I don't think that actually fixes it unless it's a ongoing proof of liveliness, you know, like it's watching you post. It's like driving a Tesla where it's like put your hands back in the wheel type of thing. Yeah, I actually didn't know that's how it worked. You get reprimanded. I've never driven one, but that's what people say. Sean was complaining about this. Yeah, it's like five strikes.

You're out. Your car's bricked or something. I mean, I guess that makes it safer, though, right? I want someone just playing on their phone while their car's driving them around. So I do think it's an unsolved problem. And maybe we just have to bite the bullet and accept that there will be AI posts on social media. But maybe they'll just be really good. good and interesting, so it won't be that bad. Right now it's just like podcast summaries and

bots asking for money. Yeah, the AI stuff on Twitter is very low quality, but give it a year. It'll be better than us. Some of these, it's like every week this open AI stuff gets better and better. It's really crazy. It's remarkable. All right, so I think that's it for the week. What do you think the tariffs are going to look like next week? I think many of these nations, not China, but some of them have already negotiated, I think. Didn't Vietnam and Israel already negotiate? Vietnam, Israel, maybe Canada is trying to negotiate? So I think 30% of the nations named will negotiate and will end up with just free trade across both countries. So I don't think it's as apocalyptic as people think. I don't think those penguins up in the Antarctic region, they're

they're not going to be going to negotiate yeah they don't even know they don't even know they're under tariff no those guys are they're in a tough spot i feel really much they're going to they will never be able to export to us no all right everyone we will be back on monday we have an exciting episode on monday have a safe and healthy weekend