On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 06/03/22 (Insider trading in NFTs, takeaways from Oslo, Biden wants to lower BTC emissions) (EP.324)

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

The original roundup cast return for a covid-stricken episode. In this roundup:  The boys are laid low with Covid (again!) Nic recounts his visit to Norwegian parliament Nic recaps the Oslo Freedom Forum Are we on the brink of L2 summer? Former Opensea PM is arrested on wire fraud/insider trading charges Is there an insider trading standard for non-securities? Korean prosecutors summon all Terraform Labs staff Biden admin looks to lower the emissions footprint of Bitcoin Two ways for the US Government to lower the emissions of Bitcoin Does banning an asset make it worth less? Do we need net neutrality for power? OneRiver's ETF application is denied How the SEC can unlock $6b worth of value to Bitcoin investors Crypto firms settle in for winter Fidelity Digital Assets is doubling their headcount Nic's affiliate merch scandal Sponsor notes: Subscribe to the Coin Metrics State of the Network newsletter

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

Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. This episode is brought to you by Coin Metrics. And here is the Metrics Minute. This is the Metrics sponsored by Coin Metrics. Coin Metrics is an industry leading provider of institutional-grade crypto market network data research and risk management products. They publish a great weekly newsletter called State of the Network, which just turned three years old, happy birthday, to state of the network. From this issue, some highlights. $100 invested on May 29th, 2019 in Bitcoin,

when city of the network first launch, would be worth $360 today. There have been $8 trillion worth of Bitcoin transferred on chain in the last three years. If you invested $100 in ETH, when state of the network launched, that would be worth $723 today. And all time,

$14.3 billion have been spent on Ethereum transaction fees. So if you want to follow state of the network, the link is in the show notes, and that is the Metrics Minute. That was a good call to action on the Metrics Minute there. I like what you did there. It's like if you had started paying attention to Coin Metrics earlier, you'd be a lot richer right now. That was the vibe I got there. Quite possibly, yeah. There's been some quality alpha in that news.

I think I wrote the first issue of the state of the network. I don't want to steal anyone's thunder, but I believe that I did. Did they think about maybe a call to action like, hey, go launch a Bitcoin ETF and use our reference rates and pay us for it? Or like go start a crypto business at a big bank and buy some market data. I feel like there's just very few number of listeners that could satisfy that. Well, this is the first episode that we've ever done where we both have COVID. So we're both currently COVID positive. Yeah.

So that's why we sound like our mouths are full of maple. syrup. But incredibly, so this is your first time. First timer. Yep, first timer. This is my second time in the space of three months. I, that's like mathematically, that's almost hard to do. But you said that you're in a very contained area with someone. So it was kind of a stressful situation. I went to Norway. I went to the Arctic Circle and I managed to contract some European brand of COVID, I guess, the same as the American vintage, I would say. It's not good. I don't like how this is happening. So is this something I have to look forward to? I'm going to get like the Norway version. I think I have this Omnacron one. Yeah, there's just variants, all kinds of new variants all the time.

Yeah, basically everything I thought I knew about immune systems is out the window. Well, in your absence, we had a little bit of a Wally Pip situation. Someone came in and just stole your starting spot on the roundup. Mattishevsky, rave reviews last week. Yeah, he killed it. Um, and I, you know, the feedback was that he's much higher energy than me, much more engaging, seems more excited about the deals. Yeah, it loves the deals. So, I mean, that's all true. So look, if Dan, if you want to take my spot, you can have it. I think I've done, God knows how many episodes of this show. I think it's time for me to sort of walk off into the sunset. It's not really the winning attitude that you're looking for out of your co-hosts.

I mean, this show has run a long time. It's an old show. But we don't shut the, all this shows die in the crypto winter. We work through the crypto winter. We've had so many crypto winters. Yeah. This is not, we keep on working. We can't give it up now.

I mean, like the Joe Roke. experience has done over a thousand shows I think well over a thousand so and we're only at like 320 we're gonna catch up to him in no time I mean yeah we're doing two or three a week there's a lot of stuff to talk about so you were gone last week because you were speaking with Norwegian parliament about Bitcoin as one does that was part of it I didn't realize that was going to happen it was kind of sort of thrust upon me but yeah I was there in Oslo for the Oslo Freedom Forum, which is really cool, put on by the Human Rights Foundation. Shout out to Alex Gladstein for putting that together. And part of it involved visiting the parliament

and having a chat with some sort of senior members of parliament about Bitcoin. And so partly there are a number of human rights activists involved. They were talking about how they actually use Bitcoin in real sort of critical real life situations. We're, you know, talking Nigerian activists, Senegalese, Togolese, Venezuelan. I was incredibly moved by that, actually. And then there was a contingent of sort of myself, Lin Alden, Jack Mallors. And, you know, we talked about, you know, things like answering their questions on energy consumption. So I found it very productive. Look, I don't know if Norway's going to put 5% of their sovereign wealth fund into Bitcoin, but if they do, you know, you know who to think. You know who to thank. Yeah, that's all I'm saying.

Lynn Alden. Yeah, she's definitely the number one advocate. But yeah, it was really cool, and they were very welcoming, and they listened to everything we had to say. How was the Oslo Freedom Forum? I thought it was really great. I met a bunch of real world sort of actual dissidents, you know, which is always pretty humbling. Because, like, you know, I feel like Bitcoiners think of themselves as dissidents a little bit, but then you meet these people that are actually, like, exiled or, like, they've done, like, hard time in, like, military prison because they, like, spoke out against some regime or other. And it's like, oh, yeah, these are, like, real actual freedom fighters.

And, you know, I basically, like, post tweets and stuff. So very humbling. There are a lot of Brinknationers there. So thank you for saying hi. Nice. And then my big takeaway was there's a real contingent of actual activists that use Bitcoin in everyday situations. You know, and it's sort of like very common now.

It's not just a matter of finding like isolated edge cases or, you know, you know, super technical activists here and there. It's actually pretty mainstreamed in activist circles. And I think HRF is really responsible for a lot of that. So it's very encouraging because you sort of forget about these things where it's very sort of academic and you have all these data you look at to see adoption. But, you know, in the sort of real world out there, there's actually really meaningful adoption. That's awesome. Well, I think what Alex Gladstein is doing there is terrific. He really burst on the scene in the Bitcoin scene the past few years. But just to, you know, doing awesome work. Yeah, he's done so much to contribute. Yeah, unfortunately, I managed to

also get COVID as a byproduct that's worth it overall, I'd say. Yeah, I'd say that sounds like a worthwhile trip. Well, we had a busy podcast week here. I guess not as busy as some weeks past, but I did an episode with Andrew Cahill and Sir Rob from the Block, talked about Ethereum layer two scaling. That was timely. Optimism launched their token this week, so a lot of talk this week around ETH scaling and what that roadmap's going to look like. So is it L2 summer? Are you into that? Do you believe that?

The bankless guys, I would like them to start meming that harder into existence, the L2 summer. That would be good. It doesn't feel like there's a, it feels like it's just bare market. We'll look at Jerome Powell summer right now. Yeah, we're kind of lacking a catalyst right now. It's just bare market blues. Yeah, I think it's just, you know. reduce your burn summer is sort of what it feels like for most companies and go on vacation and wait

for the merge maybe or wait for the Fed to reverse course it seems like the consensus is Arthur Hayes wrote an interesting blog post about this there is an emerging consensus that the Fed will have to change course in Q3 which seems a little potentially optimistic to me But there are a lot of sort of very credible voices saying this now. So the idea would be two more hikes, maybe a 50 and a 50, and then reverse and go down or just stay flat? I mean, and then something breaks. And then you have full debt monetization, full yield curve control. Arthur Hayes thought it would be a matter of creating all these subsidies for regular folks.

So they would have to buy gas and food and things like that, which would have to be. financed by new treasury issuance and by the Fed buying those treasuries. So increasing the size its balance sheet again. You know, Luke Groman thinks it's going to be a matter of treasury market liquidity evaporating. And then the Fed would have to become active again. So unclear, but I am seeing this more and more, this theory, that the hikes and reducing the Fed's balance she can't even last through 2023. I mean, this in an election year, of all things, just going to be really ugly for incumbents.

I think the price of the pump here is a killer for the election season. But it could be a matter of whipping inflation in 2022. And then I think what Washington is thinking is, well, maybe they'll have it under control by 2024. So take the loss in the midterms. and hopefully be in a stabbler setting for the general. Maybe. But so Joe Biden wrote an op-ed in the WSJ this week.

I saw that. I saw that, yeah. He would not interfere with the Fed. So maybe that's kind of a coded message saying like, yeah, we'll let the Fed keep hiking, even if it sort of costs us politically in this election. That's how I took it. And then he did that appearance this week.

He had powled over to the Oval Office and sat down. and took some pictures. So that seems to be the message he's putting out there. Probably a smart thing to do, but it's just going to be painful. So let's hop into some deals. First up, finance labs has raised $500 million for a fund focusing on Web3 and blockchain. Binance, that's a great fund. So that's a great fundraise.

So it looks like they've raised from some existing funds. DST seems to be an LP in this. So more capital flowing into the... the startup ecosystem. It's a good thing. Next one up is merged. This is a crypto payments and API business. They raised 9.5 million from Coinbase, Alameda, and others.

Then, Huobi has acquired Bitax, which is a Latin American focused crypto exchange. Next is Utopia Labs, a payroll and expense management platform for Dow's. They raised $23 million from Paradigm, among others. Then we've

got InfStones, which I guess is a Marvel reference. They're a blockchain infrastructure provider. They raise 66 million from soft bank, GGV, capital, and others. That's a hard one to say. Next one is Dwork. This is a Dow management platform. There raised $5 million from Paradigm and Pace Capital and others. Then we've got liminal. They're a wallet startup. There is $4.7 million from elevation capital, coin DCX, Ballagis, Srinivasa, and others. Next is Big Whale Labs, the creators of a wallet privacy protocol, raising 3.8 million from M13 Road and others.

Then we've got Cloudwall Capital, their digital asset risk management firm. They raised $6.3 million from Local Globe, Illuminate Financial, and others. We've got a new fund here. It's called Akatsuki. It's a Japanese gaming and entertainment firm. They've raised $20 million for a Web3 focused fund called Emote. Emote? You know? Emote. I was just going to say you nailed the pronunciation of Akatsuki.

Oh, I did. I got that right. But then, well, I'm guessing it. But then I botched. I did not, I didn't get the landing on emote. It looks like emote. Yeah, I guess it's emote. So then we've got canonical crypto.

Another fund, they raised 20 million focused on developer infrastructure. That's a pretty good name for a fund, canonical crypto. Totally. I kind of like that. Next one is alloy. This is a D5 protocol. It's targeting institutional investors. They raised $3 million from Headline.

This is one that I haven't heard before. A startup focused on sealed bid auctions, which is how a lot of like privatization of government services are done in sealed bid auctions. So this one is called size. There is 6 million from 3 arrows, Wintermute, MGMU, and others. And the last one is Square Enix. They have sold $300 million worth of IP related to some of their historic gaming franchises. And with the proceeds, they will invest in blockchain gaming.

Blockchain gaming, very hot right now. So there was a fair amount of news this week. A lot of it has to do with regulators. striking back some, you know, quite intense news items here. I guess we'll start with the one that has everyone buzzing, which is Nathaniel Chastain, former PM at OpenC, arrested on wire fraud and allegedly money laundering in connection with an insider trading scheme that pertaining to some amount of T trades he made while he was at OpenC. This one had Twitter completely aflame.

Yeah, so it looks like he was, I mean, this happened a few months ago where it became public and he was fired, but he was head of product, I believe, at OpenC and was front running some of the front page listings. Arrested in person in New York is something that I wasn't expecting to see come out of this story, actually. Yeah, so, there's a lot of. lot to this one. Crypto people, there's this weird myth in the crypto land that there's no insider trading

or insider knowledge associated with crypto assets because they're sort of, most of them are presumed not to be securities. That's not true. So, you know, insider trading is a pretty general thing, but it, you know, can apply to commodities. and non-securities. It really just has to do with, is there an information asymmetry based on sort of your, you know, position within some firm or market maker

or something like that, where you have access to privileged information that the market doesn't, and then you trade on it. So, I mean, basically just read Matt Levine on this. He's all, he's written about it many times. He's written about insider trading commodities markets, which generally involves front running, which is actually sort of like really similar to what happened here. But the TLDR is

insider trading does not require someone to be a security just to bust that myth. Yeah, it's, you would think that there's going to be a spotlight. There probably already is on some of these cryptocurrency exchanges. We've seen abnormalities at Coinbase around the time of Bitcoin cash becoming an asset and getting listed. And you would think that this would just be kind of the target zone, looking at the venues. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's not uncommon to see pre-listings, pumps, regardless of which exchange it is. It's just a very common thing to see in the industry. And I know a lot of these firms do have insider trading prohibitions or just general trading prohibitions by their staff.

But clearly there's information leakages. And so the industry has been very untidy about this. Now, all that said, the numbers in this case are the absolute numbers. in terms of sort of like the profit extracted, based on that Twitter thread, at least, are very small. Yeah. There's not a huge amount of money. So, I don't know, it seems a little disproportionate.

Yeah, this one had the whole Twitter space all a buzz. Yeah, I mean, the maximum sentence here is pretty wild. So it says he's charged with one count of wire fraud, one count of money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. that's I mean that would be truly insane I'm sure that's not going to happen yeah no that'd be shocking and you know there's always a big discrepancy between like with the possibilities and then oftentimes the reality and I think of course you know we'll see what happened but the scale would be taken into account here I mean and if you're looking at the verdict and other you know with the

bitmacks defendants for instance the actual penalties they got were on the much, much lighter end. Well, here's one thing that might not be on the lighter end. It's terraform labs. Their entire staff has been summoned by Korean prosecutors from the Seoul Southern District. I didn't know Seoul had a Southern District office, but they do. And they're investigating the U.S.T. Luna Terra collapse. That's going to be dicey for some people.

Yeah, I mean, the scale of the terror loss was catastrophic. large. You're looking at, I believe, something like 200,000 retail invoices in Korea lost money on Terra or Luna or UST. Obviously, the total loss globally was 60 billion in nominal value wiped out. You know, one moment that really made me think like this whole thing is just going to end terribly was when I remember hearing certain Luna investors telling me that their bull case was actually the peg becoming the UST becoming so large and systemic that Korea would have

no choice but to back it with their own sovereign reserves That's uh drinking the hopium right there That was like part of the Bull case that was whispered around in Terra circles It was because they were they elected sort of the pro-crypto president

And then part of the bull case was that he would sort of nationalize Tara and it would become Korea's official cryptocurrency. And that was sort of like the moment I was like, okay, this whole thing is going down the drain and soon. And now there's Terra too. Yeah. I mean,

fool me once. Shame on you, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, this is all regulatory all the time here, but the Biden administration, they are reportedly preparing some policy recommendations. Looks like these will come out in August, related

to lowering the energy consumption and emissions footprint of cryptocurrency. That seems like a lot to bite off. So, all right, this is a weird one. And I have like a personal connection with this. So I actually gave a talk to a whole bunch of sort of White House staff and folks from a number of different agencies on this exact topic a few months ago.

So they've clearly been gathering information about. this including from the industry. I don't really know how it was received, frankly. But, you know, a lot of the questions I got had to do with, you know, does Bitcoin deprive anyone of energy? Is it increasing people's power prices or the power bills? Is it incentivizing renewables or is it using up renewable power that could otherwise be used for other industries? Things like that. So there's definitely some smart folks in the administration that understand Bitcoin mining really well. Now, you know, it's unclear what the objective is here. But because if you want to lower Bitcoin's energy consumption, you know, it's a globally mined commodity. So even if you

ban minors in the U.S., that's probably not going to lower it. That's just going to be effectively a subsidy to miners in other countries, you know, whether it's China or Russia or Iran. So that doesn't really help. If you want to lower the emissions, banning it in the U.S. also doesn't help because miners in the U.S. are much cleaner than sort of the global average. So that would be counterproductive. But what you could do is actually encourage miners in the U.S. to use cleaner energy to mine with. So that would actually lower the emissions. I would be shocked if the U.S. government made it easier for anyone to mine Bitcoin. But yeah, if they wanted to lower Bitcoin's aggrat emissions, that would be how you do it.

You encourage Bitcoin miners to exploit more sustainable energy. Or you try to lower the price of Bitcoin. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, that's the other thing is you can lower the price, and then, of course, miners will spend less resources mining. If you look back at sort of like gold, when they banned gold in 1933, it actually rose. Gold production increased. That kicked off kind of a bull market in gold production and the value of gold rose in real terms. So I don't know if it would work.

Banning things doesn't always sort of make them become less popular. Yeah, and this is a global market. So that would be a disaster. But, I mean, that's one obvious way to lower the footprint is to just have it not be worth anything. And people wouldn't care about it. Yeah, but, you know, I guess it's a question of, like, can you ordain the markets behave in a certain way? And, like, I guess you can, like, kind of do that. You know, some, like, sort of authoritarian regimes.

You can suspend markets and stuff. But we're a country of free markets. Yeah, you can do it in North Korea. But, you know, unless you want to be, like, New York State, I mean, that's not usually a good, good move. And there's a difference between tackling the externalities of power generation and, you know, being discretionary over who is allowed to buy power. You know, that's a big, big difference. And, you know, I think we'll have to see some kind of sort of net neutrality equivalent for power markets because it would be really irregular if the U.S. started looking

into these power contracts and being like, this kind of, this power is permissible and you're allowed to do this kind of computation, not that kind of computation. That's just, you know, I don't know, that doesn't seem like the way this country ought to work. Well, it becomes a sort of a free speech or civil liberties issue at some point where you can, you can't really discriminate around individual power use cases. I mean, this is a free market. Yeah, so we don't know what is in store for us here. Could be nothing. It could be just a request to be more transparent on the part of miners.

I think it could also end up in litigation. If it's, you know, sweeping federal policy, the states might object to it because the states earn tax revenue from mining. So who knows? So in other SEC news, so this happened on Friday, which I guess all these denials happened on Friday post-closing, but SEC has rejected One River's carbon-neutral spot Bitcoin-A-F proposal.

One River, I believe, has Jay Clayton on the payroll? Do I have that right? Is he over at One River now? As an advisor maybe? Yeah, he is an advisor. So I guess that didn't really work out. That didn't work. That didn't work. That's sort of the one reason you hire the ex-SBC chair. Well, I mean, I can see hiring

like someone who's been like, you know, on your side or something, but that didn't work. So that ETF is not going to happen. But I thought it was an interesting development that separately, Robert Whaley, who was the creator of the VIX, he was creator of the CBOE VIX index, he wrote a letter to the SEC this week, arguing that Grayscale should win approval for their GBTC product into an ETF. So people are just, all the powerhouses are lining up behind this letter writing campaign. I mean, it just makes sense.

Now, let's see, what's the discount at? It's a mere, it's almost 30% on the nose as of yesterday. So that's not the historical low, which was 31%, but it's pretty close to it. 31 is the historical low, huh? Yeah, so that was a week ago. So we're in the doldrums. There's no question about that.

It really is a consumer production issue. I mean, it just makes no sense to not allow the conversion of this instrument. So quantify how much consumer surplus would be created there. I mean, if you just get that thing approved, it's got to be $5 billion plus if you just bring that thing back to parity. Maybe you have $7 trillion, I mean, or $7 billion, rather. That's a big number in terms of the direct benefit to the holders of GBTC, I would think. So they hold around $20 billion worth of Bitcoin.

So yeah, you're unlocking $6 billion of value for investors if you do this with a joke of a pen. Protecting those consumers. Yeah, with no cost to anyone, really, just breaking open the piggy bank. Our thoughts on this are known, but go check out that letter writing campaign. Go write a letter. So a number of crypto firms are actually reducing their headcount or freezing hires. Gemini has released 10% of their team. You never like to see that.

However, Fidelity Digital Assets is looking to double its headcount. I think this type of a market actually plays really well for a fidelity or for an established legacy institution that isn't reliant on just their crypto business unit to keep it afloat. I mean, there's no surprise. Most crypto companies are going to have to do headcount reductions here in this market. I mean, this should come as no surprise. You're going to see a ton of this. in the coming weeks and months. So you're, you know, it's because the prices are going down.

It's trading volumes going down. This is all related. And, yeah, it's great to see Fidelity adding, what is it, 110 tech workers, 100 customer service specialists related to digital assets. But obviously Fidelity has other lines of business that make them money outside of their crypto business. And this isn't a secret, but you are interviewing, Abby Johnson next week, a consensus.

At consensus in Texas, yeah. Or is that a secret? No, that's on the website. I don't think I've talked about it on the podcast, but it's on the website. Yeah, we're doing the closing keynote. I'm pumped to go down to consensus in Austin, especially post-COVID. So there's a bit of a symmetry there. Abby Johnson gave a speech in 2017, Consensus 2017.

At consensus, yeah. That was, yep, five years ago. That was when it was in New York at the Marriott Marquis. And I love that Barry is just pulling all of his stuff out of New York now. Well, like, why should New York get to benefit for all of this crypto positivity, all these conferences, when it's the worst place in the United States to launch a crypto business with this bit license? So the fact that he pulled the gray scale team into Connecticut, the fact that consensus

is down in Texas, much more welcoming environment, I think it's great. Yeah, I find it refreshing that the conferences aren't just all in New York anymore. I mean, Palm Beach, permissionless, and Palm Beach was nice. That looked good, yeah. Miami now hosts a ton of stuff, as does Austin. So there's kind of a trend there. We have a bunch of startups in Austin. Some of them move there during the pandemic, but it's a great place to build a crypto business.

Yeah, a lot of people are saying that everybody that left the East Coast to move to Miami or Austin or Puerto Rico is on the verge of going back. I'm not really seeing a lot of that. I am seeing some returnees from Puerto Rico. I'm not going to lie. Yeah, you don't have to be dodging taxes in Puerto Rico when you're just going negative and losing money. Well, yeah, there's sort of like, you know,

fewer and fewer taxes to dodge in this market. You know, capital gains aren't as much of a problem anymore. But also it's like why go into exile in your 20s? This doesn't seem fun, you know. Shouldn't the goal be, the goal should be to get to the point where you don't have to do something like that. Right, exactly. Yeah, I think Dan Matashevsky has like some funny lines around that. Yeah, I mean, you want to be able to stay in your house.

Like, it's, yeah. It's also interesting that Portugal kind of rugged everybody that moved there for tax reasons. I saw that. So what they went back on that, huh? Yeah, I mean, that's tough. You know, they really did entice. a lot of people to move down to Lisbon, and it looks like they were nagging on the deal.

That's really, really tough. Yeah, can you imagine uplifting yourself and moving all the way there? Just kidding, guys. Yeah. At least the beaches are still nice. Yeah, Lisbon is a nice city regardless. Well, so that was your first one back.

First, how to feel to be back in the saddle here. I think we could have some more guest hosts every now and again give me a break. I wouldn't be opposed to that. so if you had like an occasional guest host your enthusiasm for the deals and your just tenor would be a little bit higher you get a lot of feedback about being monotone on twitter i read some of the reviews for this podcast for this podcast on the apple podcast app and they weren't all positive in fact some of them had rather derogatory things to say about both of us or just you

mostly they're attacking me but you know you get a thick skin on the internet so anyway my proposal is that Brink Nation leaves us some more positive reviews on the review function

on the app because I don't like the bad reviews I like the good reviews that's a good point that's a good we never say hey go leave us a five star review anymore I think we said that once we might have said that once

in the history of the show. And what was it the advice that we got? So tell people to subscribe, unsubscribe, resubscribe, as much as you can. That was your whole theory. I don't think the algorithm is that easily gamed, honestly. I would be shocked. I don't really know what we're competing for

because we would be doing this even if there was like two listeners. It wouldn't, we're not. You think so? I think so. When we started, it was pretty. We're in it for the fat sponsorship deals, of course. I think we're just in this for the underlying technology. Actually, GM.xyZ forward slash on the brink is where everyone's talking about the podcast.

That's true. That's a resident home. This actually does remind me that a number of sponsors reached out that I need to get back to. They're not even necessarily crypto sponsors. One of them is like this drink that you take, which is genetically engineered when you are drinking alcohol. and it does something weird to the alcohol so you don't get hung over. Oh, really? That sounds great, but that also sounds like something we could get massively sued for if it doesn't work. I mean, I actually have friends that swear by it, but I'm also terrified to try this elixir,

because what if it causes you to grow a third arm or something? Right about now, I would like to be sponsored by a COVID therapeutic company. So if anyone's listening, like, that would be a good one. Yeah, bull market for cough syrup and things like that. But yeah, you get offers all the time based on your Twitter presence to just do promoted tweets and stuff. It's true. I normally say no. Let's see. I accepted an eight sleep mattress. I will admit that much. I mean, I think it's a good product. It sounds awesome. I've not been offered one.

Yeah, I recommend it. The levels, the glucose patch, I recommend that as well, the aura ring. So yeah, sometimes you will send me things. And there's no like real deal. It's just recommended if you like it. I think that's fair. I don't think that, you know, suggests that I'm corrupt in some way. I don't know.

It's these open sea, this open sea scandal looks like nothing compared to your, you just got to, you admitted that you got a free eight sleep. Yeah, I know. That's worse. The DOJ is going to be knocking on my door any moment now. Knock on wood. Knock on wood. Unacknowledged, touting scheme, busted, bed, mattress related scheme. Well, I think that's it for the week. We've got a few things in the hopper podcast-wise for next week. I'm not sure what we're going to run. We've got some in the backlog. So we'll have more content coming your way for sure. We will see you next Monday.