On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 06/19/26 (STRC under pressure, Illinois' crypto tax, Open weight AI vs the AI boom) (EP.726)

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

Matt and Nic are back for a week of news and deals. In this episode:  The Tartan Army takes over Boston Europeans are shocked that American infrastructure works STRC falls into the low $80s STRC's liquidation cascade mechanics What are Saylor's options now? Is the US right to put the brakes on Fable? Will open weight models puncture the AI boom? Are we living in a vulnerable world? Kristin Gillebrand's son raises $30m for a perps exchange Make sure your tokenized equity provider has the equity Why aren't publishers doing pay per content Content mentioned: Nick Bostrom, The Vulnerable World Hypothesis  

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 into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. Recording this one a little late, but we'll get it out. We'll get it out. I was a little predisposed yesterday. It's at the U.S. Open. Yeah, tough day for you there.

You're telling me before we started recording that the World Cup has come to Boston that's begun to affect you personally. Is that right? Yeah, I am actually, I'm 180-degree reversed on this. I love the World Cup. I am rooting for the U.S., but I'm pulling for Scotland because we have been overrun by the Tartan Army up here in Boston.

So there's just a bunch of. bunch of lunatic, Scottish, mostly men, I'm assuming, guys running around in kilts, drinking everything in sight, is that right? They're drinking the city dry, and they're actually, like, very pleasant. I don't think they're causing any vandalism, destruction. People love these guys. So I pulled this thing and said from Thursday to Sunday of last week, the tartan army drank four times as much Samuel Adams, Boston Lager as would normally be consumed on a four-day

holiday stretch at a local bar. The tap room opposite city hall ran dry. These guys are literally drinking Boston. And Boston is a pretty well-stocked city. Alcohol-wise in the first place. Yeah, I mean, I love the Scots. I spent five years with them. They're great people.

They're not really that good at soccer, to be honest. They're not? They did beat. I don't know. They're playing Morocco today, right? They beat Haiti. So that's probably the worst team in the World Cup. They got Morocco today at Foxborough.

You know what's so funny? Have you seen all this content about Europeans just, being astonished that America, like, has functional infrastructure and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. So they've, so the World Cup renamed all the stadiums, by the way. I don't think it's Gillette Stadium anymore. No, it's Boston Stadium.

And then MetLife, I think, became the New York, New Jersey Stadium. Oh, really? Yeah, so they couldn't. The Europeans are coming over here and they're seeing that we've big stadiums. They can't believe it. But don't they have big stadiums? stadiums too for soccer over there? They have some big stadiums, but they actually don't have that many, believe it or not.

Like American college football stadiums just kind of blows most of these European stadiums out of the water. So I took the ferry to get to the U.S. Open in Long Island, and there was a lot of tartans on there with their kilts, I guess they're called. They're basically skirts. But I'd have to imagine that if you're European, you're probably like, hey, our trains are a lot better. So in terms of infrastructure, I think they have us.

speed on. Yeah. I think they just thought that American infrastructure was kind of non-existent. And it's not great. I mean, American, it's not like I would brag about American infrastructure, but we do have very big and impressive sports venues. That's true. That part's true. So we're good at that. And then they really like Buckees and Costco and Bass Pro Shops and things like that. I mean, what's not to love? Honestly, you walk into a Bass Pro Shop. So you You could spend all day in one of those things. I like it too. We don't have Buckees up here.

I think the thing is, I think the reason why this is happening is the Europeans have been subject to kind of propaganda for a while now that America is just the worst place. It's very violent, poor. And then they get here and it turns out, I was looking at it yesterday, U.S. GDP is almost, I want to say it's almost 50% higher than European GDP now. Is that right? I mean, it's it's substantially higher. And the divergence is only widening

because the Europeans kind of refuse to, you know, use AI. So it's only getting worse. Well, now they can't. Now they can't. Yeah, now we turn off. And neither can we for now. We turned off AI for them. So it's only going to get worse.

It's a fable thing. What do you make of this? So export controls have, uh, have hit here in the AISC? Yeah, I mean, remember the last time the government was fighting with Anthropic and everyone took the side of Anthropic at first and then later on people were like maybe the government was actually right. I'm doing the same thing here.

I'm on the side of the government, not Anthropic. I think, you know, Anthropic is run by these kind of delusional EA idealists that think that only they can be entrusted with this technology, but at the same time they love saying about how dangerous it is.

It seems very counterproductive. I think the U.S. government took them at their word and they believe what they're telling them. You know, and if you believe it, if you believe that this thing is as dangerous as nuclear weapons, it becomes a matter of national security. Who gets it? I accept that explanation. Yeah, you're right that Anthropic was just pushing this narrative for the past couple of years around how dangerous this is. And it seems like, you know, now the government is agreeing with them.

So it's hard to argue that. But it would be interesting to see where this goes. I mean, I would think that open source models and the ability to push open. open source models closer to the frontier becomes very important here. Yeah, I mean, I think basically frontier models will be licensed exclusively to American firms or to the government. And maybe it's only a tiny subset of firms that get access to the frontier. Simultaneously, the pressure to create open source alternatives grows. There's a new Chinese model, I think, out in the last week that's considered to be very good.

So with a quarter, maybe two quarters of lag, you're going to have open source models behind the frontier. and that's what everyone's going to use. It'll be cheaper as well. And I think that's where we're going. I'm interested to see what happened with that jailbreak. So Amazon apparently was able to do something on Fable that caused a lot of concern in the Commerce Department. Yeah, it seems like they were just able to construct a prompt

that went outside the guardrails. Yeah. I mean, it is worrying because at the end of the day, like if there is an open-weight model that's a good distillation, a fable, it's going to give you instructions to build biological weapon. You can't stop people doing that. And it's like you could have just looked it up before. You probably like bought a physical book that said,

this is how you make rice in or whatever. So that information did exist before. But now it's sort of much more accessible and at your fingertips. And then there's this really good essay about this by Nick Bostrom called, I think it's the Vucerm. vulnerable world hypothesis. And his idea is that we were kind of lucky that certain technologies didn't make us vulnerable.

Like it was hard to build a nuclear weapon, right? And he argues that we might be entering this era of vulnerable world where it becomes easy to build a world destroying technology. And I actually do buy that. And then you just have to hope that there's no one person that's so mentally unwell that they just build a world destroying weapon. or hope that AI gets so good that we can synthesize vaccines really quickly or defenses really quickly. But I actually do kind of agree with what the anthropic people are saying and that we're entering this period of vulnerability.

Yeah, but it's scary because you are going to be able to distill these models, it seems like. And, you know, the open source ones, the open weights will be pretty close, I'd imagine. Yeah, there's no way to stop it. And I think that is the thing that punctures the AI. CapEx explosion is, and I've seen people starting to accept this as well, is that the enterprise is probably going to use open weight models, and it's going to be a hundred times cheaper than Frontier. I think they have to, just from a cost perspective, I think you're just going to have routing. We're going to end up talking a lot about routing, I think, over the next few years,

these OMSs is EMSs for routing to LLMs. But the worry is how much of GDP growth and the general health of the economy from a credit perspective, how much of that is premised on these labs paying top dollar for the interconnected web of revenue between the labs and the hyperscalers and the neoclods, if the labs stop taking in the revenue that they've been expecting, does that puncture the growth story that's been powering the economy. I think that's a big question. All right. Let's hop into some deals of the week.

First one up is a stable coin deal, Trace Finance, a stable coin infrastructure company. They raised $32 million from coin fund, Coinbase ventures, and others. Range is a stable coin transaction monitoring platform. There is $8 million from TX Ventures, Maven 11, and 630 ventures. Then it's El Dorado, a P-to-P cross-border payments app. They raised $9 million from paradigm, Coinbase Ventures, and Verta Ventures. EarnOS is a blockchain-based brand rewards app.

There is $6 million from 1KX, coin-based ventures, and EV3. Here's an acquisition. Masari, the crypto data and intelligence company, they were acquired by Blockworks for reported value of $10 million. And there's been a ton of consolidation in the crypto data space. You have Misar and Block codes. Kyko bought Amber.

And this was kind of always going to happen. just do the economics of that business. Next up we have Carta, stable coin-based card company. They raise $15 million from Galaxy, Illuminate Canarian Clock Tower. Then it's Flutter Wave. This is a non-crypto company to begin with,

but it's an African payments business. They raised some money here. It was unannounced how much they raised, but it's a strategic investment from Ripple that values the company at $3.2 billion. And this is the most curious deal of the week. Theodore Gillibrand, the son of New York Senator Curson Gillibrand, has reportedly raised $30 million at a reported $300 million valuation for a derivatives exchange in a round led by

Lux Capital. So what's the deal with this? He's like 22 years old and starting a crypto? Is this crypto derivatives? Yeah, crypto derivatives. Theodore Gillibrand, fresh out of college. this is called the American Perpetuals Exchange Corporation. There seems to be a crypto angle, and he's aiming to get onshore.

In a quote, he said, it's clear that the future of these markets is not an offshore and unregulated foreign entities, but in regulated an institutional American company, it kind of seems like he's taking shots at hyperliquid, actually. I mean, I see the market opportunity. You don't see a 22-year-old raising $30 million every day, that's for sure. I mean, he has a good CV, I will say. He does. He went to Groton. He is a Stanford graduate.

He interned at Andreessen and Paradigm. So it's actually the best CV I've ever seen, but is it worth $300 million at age 22? Well, I mean, if it works, I guess it'll be worth a lot more than that. So interesting story. I didn't know that she had a son that was in the industry. Impressive young man, but a lot of conspiracies around this one too. All right. I think we're going to talk about micro strategy here.

But before we do, why don't we talk about this Illinois thing? This is crazy. So the state of Illinois has signed into law a new tax. It has a 0.2% tax on all digital asset transfers. that includes self-custodial. So if you move assets from your treasurer wallet, ledger to Coinbase, you need to pay a 0.2% tax on that transfer. This is pretty unprecedented.

And if you think about the trading firms that are in Chicago, it's going to have a huge impact on them if this law actually stands. Looks like it goes into effect. You're saying January 1st of 2027. I can't believe that this actually passed. Yeah. I mean, this is just completely insane. I mean, it's the most hostile tax package I've ever seen in any asset class.

There's nothing like it anywhere else. There's no tax on moving cash from your vault to your safe to your bank. Like this thing taxes you when you move your funds from one hardware wallet to another. I mean, it's unenforceable. I don't know how they would go about. detecting this, quantifying it. I mean, it just means that if you're a business doing crypto in Illinois and Chicago, you have to leave. That's the only option. Oh, yeah. I mean, if this actually stands every crypto company, also basically all these trading firms, I think, would have to leave, too,

because a lot of them do touch cryptocurrency. And this was added at the last minute into a broader budget bill. And then it was signed by Governor J.B. Prisker on June 16th. I don't know how this actually stands. As you point out, there's no way to actually monitor this. I mean, when you're talking about self-custodial, it's like, it's the equivalent of if I gave you $100, it's like, how would anyone have visibility into that? Or if you moved $100 from your bank account to your Coinbase account, right? Like, there's just no way to monitor it. So if we stapled a ledger to a Frisbee and pass it back and forth a few times, we would be taxed greater than the value of all of the Bitcoin on that ledger.

So I'd have to imagine this is just, hey, we have a big budget deficit in this bill and we need to have more revenue. And so we're going to ascribe a bunch of revenue to this use case. It's not going to work. I mean, think about DRW, jump, all these big trading firms. They're going to have to leave if this actually stands. It's crazy. I mean, Chicago has been trying to kill the Golden Goose for a long time.

And I think this is something for California to, to to ponder as well because all of these big trading firms are leaving Chicago already. Yeah, a lot of them moving to Florida. I mean, there's issues with Florida for sure. And it takes a lot to move your headquarters and your staff and their families and their kids are in school. And it's really disruptive, but I think they're determined to do it. And so they're over-exploiting a resource that they thought was cast. And they're just not.

Capital's mobile. Firms are mobile. Even if they don't want to, they can if they have to. It's the same thing here. What are jump in DRW and all these guys in Chicago? I mean, there's a big set of crypto firms in Chicago. What are they going to do? They have to leave if this thing stays in effect.

Unfortunately, I think the first thing you have to do is spend a lot of money on legal challenges to this. I'm sure the legal challenges will be immediate. and then you, you know, you evaluate your alternatives and they're going to have to leave. I mean, this just makes their businesses less viable. Yeah, I mean, I don't think this is constitutional, frankly. I don't know which amendment it violates, but it seems completely arbitrary. So I don't think it'll stand. So my guess is that it gets struck down, but it's still a really crazy provocation from Illinois.

It's the kind of thing I'd expect from some European state, not from an American state. Yeah, I agree with that. All right, let's talk about micro strategy here. So wild few days in the market, STRC, which is their preferred, which has, I think, over $10 billion of notional in it, that slipped down to $0.85, or $85, rather, it's supposed to be, you know, theoretically this would trade at $100 a share, kind of where it's. pegged. It looks like they're going to have to do something here. We talked about this last week, but they're going to either have to sell Bitcoin to get cash or they're going to have to really

sell a lot of MSTR at the money in order to get cash because they have this big, big, outstanding thing to deal with, which is the STRC dividends. Or I guess they could just stop paying them, but it seems like they're in a pickle here. Yeah, so STRC traded down all the way down to $82. meant to trade it 100 yesterday. It's currently trading at $88. It's been de pegged. I mean, it's not a hard peg, but it's been off par. Since mid-May, so over a month now.

The other instrument, similar, strives SATA, which is very similar in nature, traded down in $93. It's at $97 right now. So it sold off in sympathy. I think what happened was this thing has been off its par for so long that certain holders lost faith in it and started to get concerned that would never regain par and sold

and that kicked off a liquidation cascade because you had, from what I can tell, there's a lot of people that took out loans to buy this stuff on their broker. Yeah, this chart looks like someone got blown up, right? I mean, someone was over levered and got margin called. It's very clear that leverage had built up

in this instrument. It traded at par for a long time. People thought it was kind of anchored there. Certainly what Sailor says about it doesn't help. I mean, he implies that this thing is much more stable than it really is, I think. And it looks to me like people took out margin loans, whatever, six or seven percent to buy something they thought was yielding 11 or 12 percent. And then they just got margin called. And I think that's what happened here.

And you do have all these instruments in defy that are holding this too, right? So it could have been partially a defy liquidation cascade. Yeah, it doesn't help. there's hundreds of millions of dollars of stable coins issued against this thing, which is, I mean, it's so reminiscent of Terra Luna. It really is. It really is. Sailor just makes me nervous here.

I mean, the way that even they calculate MNAV and how they've shifted that over time, it just doesn't feel like a well-run organization at this point. Not at all. And I do wonder who owns this thing because everybody I know when we talk about it, nobody finds Sailor credible. No one finds them trustworthy. at all. I mean, he said he used AI to help design the instrument. Yeah, that was awful. And then

there was a video of Jack Mallor asking him questions around how MNAV is calculated. And it's clear that they're not calculating in the same way as all these other debts. There's a lot of smoke here. I do want to point out, we had talked about the fact that they had paid down 1.5 billion of the converts, and it looked like they were paying them off like three years early. We were asking why they would do that. And I hadn't heard a good response, but we actually got a listener email about this. It turns out, according to this listener, that the bonds had a put right by the note holder at par in June 2028 with the conversion price of 6.72. So the bonds are basically zero coupons. And strategy was going to have to redeem them at par in two years. And a failure to redeem them

on the put date would have constituted an event of default, making them real debt. So there was some some urgency, I suppose, to do something here, whether they had to do it right away and spook the market, I think is unclear. But it goes to show you. I mean, this capital structure is just really complicated. And as we've said many times, we don't own this thing and haven't really spent a ton of time getting into the guts of the cap structure, but it's buyer beware. Yeah. So in terms of sailors' options here, it seems like Twitter spent the last couple of days discussing this exclusively. He could suspend the dividend.

I mean, he doesn't really owe STRC holders anything, but I think it would be very bad for the franchise if he did that. Some of the options being floated was actually buying back STRC at a discount, although he needs to raise cash to do that. The only way is to get cash or to sell MSTR or sell Bitcoin. There was one post that went semi-viral on Twitter that suggested he sell $50,000 to $60,000 of Bitcoin and retire some of the STRC, which would probably be his best option, short-term pain, long-term gain, maybe,

but it would just be horrific for Bitcoin. The problem is you just don't have any alignment here between MSTR holders, STRC holders, and then holders of Bitcoin. And he's going to have to pick who he wants to make hold here. Someone's getting screwed. And since he designed it, with AI, I consulted AI to try and determine what he would do next. Because what is what is AI isn't that what you have to imagine he's at his workstation right now asking Claude not

mythos 4.8 I guess the slightly less unfortunately the scary thing is that back when he was designing this with AI the frontier model is 4.0 like a really not he should have just waited he should a way to to, I mean, he was able to build a financial weapon of mass destruction with a very inferior model. So that's actually a good point. Yeah, totally misaligned there. So I think if we want insight into what he's going to do next, we just have to ask AI because presumably he's asking AI. AI says crush MSTR. Okay, so AI says crush MSTR, but like, all right, you have a board of directors that strategy. It's not like this guy can make a decision like this in a vacuum. They have a fiduciary obligation to MSTR holders.

How do they do that? But preferred is literally preferred to the common. Yeah. I guess. I mean, I think you have to make, this is such a fascinating legal question because as a fiduciary, you have the duty of carry,

of the duty of loyalty. As a board member, you have to make the right decision for all shareholders. Common and preferred. So I would, common and preferred. And so you can't be just

crushing the common at the expense of the preferred. I think you have to, Bitcoin doesn't have a shareholder base. I think you have to, from a fiduciary perspective, sell the Bitcoin. That's actually, yeah, I think that's right, kind of from a sort of legalistic sense. Yeah. I mean, what other option do you have? I mean, you raised all this money. You have reps and warranties and you told people that this thing was going to do a certain thing. And look, if the price of Bitcoin goes up to 200,000, I think is less of an issue. But this thing continues to trade flat or go down. I don't see how you can disadvantage MSTR holders.

Yeah, and there was a good post on Twitter, which I forgotten who wrote it. So my apologies, but it basically compared the STRC instrument to a perpetual, basically longing Bitcoin on a purpose exchange with Bitcoin collateral, which you used to pay, you know, you know how perpetual works. You use like periodic the longs, pay the shorts and the shorts pay the longs. So what would you do if you had a massive Bitcoin long that you're underwater on that you had to keep on paying these interest payments to the other side of the trade? You would just presumably reduce the size of the long.

Yeah. You would just close out part of it. And how would you do that? You sell Bitcoin. So that's kind of the logical thing to do. However, it really does a lot of damage to the story. And I think he just doesn't want to do that. Totally.

I mean, this guy owns, I mean, how much Bitcoin does he hold right now? He has $53.3 billion worth of Bitcoin on the balance sheet right now. So if he starts selling this, people are going to be racing to the exits to try to front run it. So this is so reflexive on the way down could get so much uglier. In isolation, in isolation, without considering second order effects, the right thing to do is to sell the Bitcoin. However, in the real world, you can't sell the Bitcoin. You can't because it just kicks off this doom loop.

In the real world, you have to hope, it's not a good option. You have to hope the Bitcoin goes up and sell some MSTR to buy herself time and hope. Yes. And the crazy thing is people are still buying MSTR. He had over $200 million of at the money equity sales last week. Yeah. That's the thing that baffles me the most in this whole situation is not who is buying STRC because I understand that, but who is buying MSTR? It's crazy to me. I mean, people are just walking in front of a steamroller picking this thing up. But I guess it's a free market. All right. So that is, I mean, something's going to happen there next week. Something has to happen. So we'll keep you abreast of that. Coinbase said they're going to launch tokenized stocks backed one for one by the underlying shares

with dividends pass through. So tokenized equities were in the spotlight on the hills with the SpaceX IPO. Hyperliquid did over a billion in volume for SpaceX on the IPO day. And meanwhile, exchanges like Binance and ByBit refunded customers after not getting allocation in the IPO to fulfill the tokenized pre-IPO. shares demand. Yeah, crazy week. I think a lot of these crypto exchanges, just their back-end brokerage firms, whoever their partners with just didn't get allocations here.

So it seems like everyone got their fill on SpaceX except for the kind of the crypto neobanks and in brokerages. I also saw that Coinbase launched an AI advisor, a registered investment advisor with an AI kind of tooling on top of it. So it seems like they're making a bigger push into regulated. financial services. Yeah, it really goes to show if you're buying a tokenized equity, you need your service provider to have true access to the underlying.

Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, I think the fact that these exchanges by bit finance didn't get filled, it's probably not the worst thing in the world. So the CME sued the CFTC over its approval of perpetual futures for Calcium Coinbase arguing that the contracts are swore. ops and not futures, and the CFTC is called the suit frivolous. Terry Duffy at the CME announced that he's retiring,

kind of a, I mean, a complete legendary figure in the commodities world. It's interesting to me that CME is so actively against this. Clearly, it's just protecting their turf, but if CME wanted, I would think that they could be an enormous player in the perpetual futures market. World Liberty Financial is close to winning a OCC National Trust Charter, not entirely clear what they would be doing with that. Is that to issue a stablecoin or something? What do they need that for?

Yeah, I mean, a number of things, I guess, to issue and redeem their stable coin, manage reserves, provide custody. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if they get it. Lots of people have been getting these charters recently. Can we just get a market structure bill first? We just get that done.

I think this is going to become. kind of a talking point from an ethics perspective. If a company that aligned can get that license. Let's just get the market structure built on. MasterCard launched agent pay for AI. That's a protocol that lets AI agents pay each other. And it logs their spending permissions onto Polygon. So ad yen, Coinbase, and Cloudflare are early partners there.

More and more of these use cases around agentic payments. I mean, a lot of consortiums forming, a lot of partnerships. Still don't see a lot of this in the wild yet, but probably just a matter of time. Yeah, I'm shocked because X4 or two volumes fell a lot. And in my opinion, AI is pretty good now. So why are we not trusting it to transact for us? I'm actually really surprised by how behind we are in terms of just unleashing our models to go buy stuff. I think it's kind of building out that network, right?

Because it's, I don't think a lot of people are just going to unleash their agents to go do things. that they do in the Web 2 context of buying things on Amazon. But I would do that. It's probably new types of... I would do that. I just don't see that as that huge of a use case. I think the idea of paying for API calls is much more of a compelling use case.

I understand that, but I also want to spend to use AI to do Web 2 purchases for me. Like I want... What about this? You take a picture of your fridge and your pantry. You send it to your favorite model, and you say, buy groceries for me, get everything that I need.

that's so much easier than physically going to the store or going to Amazon Fresh and like clicking everything one at a time and going through checkout flow and whatever. Why is that not possible today? I guess that would be possible. Some of these things would work a lot better if you had a sensor, right? It's like, okay, I need more dishwasher pods. The AI has told you that you only have three left or something and go buy some. I just don't know if we have the I mean it's not fully integrated

into the real world yet and it also needs like calendar integration and when the deliveries etc but I feel like this is completely doable today with the technology we have today I think it probably is doable I just don't know if that's a burning problem

for a lot of people I think people are more than happy to take the five minutes to figure out they need milk and just stop on the way home but the part that may be bigger in my mind is the idea of moving off of subscriptions and just using agentic payments to access websites and services online.

I'm a seller of that because I think that screws over the publishers. The publishers want to lock you into an annoying paywall subscription that you never cancel. You forget to cancel. Some publishers do. I think some other publishers would just make a lot more money if it was gated with a micropayment.

So that is the question. It's just what is the tipping point? Yeah. You could make an argument that the New York Times would make more money if people just had to pay a 20 cents per click. It's a good question for an economist, right? What is your Pareto-efficient maximization point of revenue of micropayments versus user hostile subscriptions?

Right, right. And everybody is 100% you know, subscription model or ad supported, which is basically failing, you have to imagine that some publishers are going to break away from the orthodoxy and go for the pay per content model. Yeah, and I think we're going to have to have that critical mass built up because there are just some subscriptions that I won't buy.

I mean, I already have Wall Street Journal, Globe, I have New York Times, but I'm not going to get the Washington Post just to read one article. I only subscribe to the information. that's it. Yeah, I have that one too. And then I just kind of resent. This is going to sound harsh.

I don't want to pay for some of this stuff because I disagree with a lot of these publications. And so the problem is if you want to be indexed, you have to have a soft paywall. That's the problem. So I think people are willing to invest the tools to beat the paywall as opposed to, but I would pay. I would pay a dollar for certain articles. Yeah. So in my mind, that's a pretty near-term use case for agentic payments.

But we'll see. I'm heartened by the fact that so much time and attention has gone into this because I think you're going to see some good products popping out the other side. In crime family news, ex-Sceo CEO Alex Machinsky has gotten a lifetime ban from the CFTC. I think he's in jail, right? I think so. So I guess probably, I mean, I don't think he was going to come back and be running like, a CFTC regulated business in the first place, but now he officially cannot.

So also in crime, SPF, his odds of a pardoner at 14% all I can good. I think Trump made some indication that he was not going to consider the pardon, which I don't know why Trump would ever consider a pardon for SPF, even if, you know, Trump's pardoned some questionable people. That's true. But they had to be Republicans, right? They had to be Trump supporters. And SPF is like the biggest Trump hater that existed.

Well, whoever's writing his tweets these days is trying to correct that a little bit. But yeah, I'd probably bet on Ryan Salem having a better shot there than SBF, that's for sure. So Senators Lammas and Gallego filed a resolution opposing a presidential pardon for SBF. So you have congressional objections to this. that's bipartisan.

All right, in World Cup news here, pulling up the polymarket, so the U.S. is favored against Australia. Yeah, oh, yeah, for sure. Australia is not good. So, 61%. Yeah. And then the Tartan Army here,

they're big underdogs to Morocco, it looks like. Well, yeah. They only have a 17% of Morocco. Morocco are one of Africa's best teams. And unfortunately, Scotland, they're just not very good. They're not good at soccer.

they've been playing it for hundreds of years over there? Yeah, I mean, I guess soccer was invented in the British Isles. I don't know. I don't think it was Scotland, per se, but there have been some great Scots when it comes to soccer. But yeah, it's a very small country. Interesting. All right, well, I think I might have to have this on.

I'm coming around to the soccer. It's still going to be, all these games, by the way, are like 1-1-2-2. It's just there's a game. There was a time last week. think there's four games in one day and they were all ties yeah that's true but they can only be ties in the group stages in the knockout stages someone has to win so that's a shootout right yeah or i think it's extra time and then penalties penalty kicks or whatever so the u.s is looking good they're looking good they're playing today at 3 p.m let's go u.s all right we're pulling for the u.s

also on Polly Market right now, Claude Fable 5 restored for U.S. customers, 75% odds by July 1. Wouldn't I thought that? Yeah. I mean, I think that makes sense. It's very interesting that there's now this imperialism element

with AI where other countries can't get the frontier. But I also get it. The U.S. did kind of pay for everything, right? I mean, the U.S. investor, mostly the U.S. lender, the banks, private equity. So it kind of makes sense, but it is. I kind of do feel bad for, you know, the Europeans that they're going to be using the fourth rate AI. Is that statement actually true, though? So yes, the U.S. paid for it in the sense that U.S. venture funds, private equity, and credit funds all financed this.

but they financed it largely with L.P. dollars from the Middle East, I would argue. I think that it's like maybe we share it a little bit. The median dollar was American. But also the people that made, that came up with AI are like, I don't want to sound like, you know, it's like a bleeding heart here. But the people that came up with it are like Russians and Chinese. Yeah. I mean, mostly Russians, right?

Yeah, a lot of Russian guys. It's like Russian guys. who came over to the U.S. But it's, you know, it's like the nuclear bomb. You know, it was a bunch of German guys that built it. Yeah, and that's why, you know. And they didn't get the bomb.

Bring us your smartest people and we'll give them citizenship and let them work on cutting edge tech. That's kind of one of the main advantages of the country. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think we're going down this path into shrinking globalization and neo-feudalism

and, you know, the rest of the world will get Chinese openweight models and the U.S. gets the frontier. All right, everyone. Sorry for the delayed publishing, but we'll be back on Monday. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend. We'll see on Monday.