On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/07/23 (Taylor Swift's FTX secret, XRP vs glazed donuts, ETF seeding) (EP.436)

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Matt and Nic are back for more deals and news. In this episode:  Matt's plover rivalry Matt's struggles against animals Taylor Swift actually did sign that partnership with FTX Are Eras tour tickets securities? Lightning in emerging markets Could we build the SR-71 today? How Ripple was 90% right about XRP being the bridge currency for remittances ETF applications hiccup More SAB121 issues Matt's cigar snafu Why ETF seeding will be a source of buy pressure Sponsor notes:  Coin Metrics' State of the Network: Q2 2023 Wrap-Up In this issue of State of the Network, we provide a data-driven overview of the events that shaped digital asset ecosystem in Q2, 2023

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 to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Concentuteease. 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. And this episode is brought to you by Coin Metrics. And here is the Metrics Minute. All right. So for this Metrics minute, we're going to talk about key events that took place in crypto markets in the second quarter. Bitcoin's 90-day correlation to the S&P 500 has fallen to its lowest level since January 2021. On the other hand, its correlation of gold has strengthened dramatically in June. Al-Qoens named in the SEC lawsuit against Coinbase, including Sol, Cardano, and Maddoch are down 23, 29, and 31% since the lawsuit. USDT, tethered supply reached an all-time high of 85 billion in quarter two, benefiting from chokepoint 2, happening in the U.S.

USDC supply has dropped to 26 billion levels we haven't seen since September 2021. The gray scale Bitcoin Trust discount narrowed its discount to 27% only with hopes of a conversion to an ETF. And Bitcoin miners earn more fees in Q2 2020-23 than the previous five quarters combined riding the Ordnals wave. That's your metrics minute and a half. That was a long one. was a long one. I got a bonus half minute. Do you have a good fourth? You know, Miami people are not as interested in fireworks, I would say, as other cities. Which I was a little surprised by. I thought there'd be more. Maybe I'm just in the wrong part. So the fireworks in my town were canceled because of the piping plovers, I think they're called. Clovers or plovers. It's like some endangered

species bird that goes into the beach and they borrow. And you can't have fireworks. works. I think it's, I think it's a horrible, horrible rule. I think they should just put the coyotes on the beach and eat these, eat these plovers. They cause more damage to people's summer than, than anything. I don't even think they're endangered anymore. Those plovers are robbing us of our patriotic joy. Yeah. Just you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, yeah, it's terrible. Offer plovers. I don't, I honestly don't think they're endangered anymore. I think there should just be a national. So you want to put them back on, make the plovers endangered again.

That's your campaign. Yeah, I think we should just set coyotes loose on the beaches of Massachusetts and just get rid of these plovers once and for all. They don't. The plovers don't fear us enough. They're like the turkeys. They don't fear me enough either. So there's a running theme in your life, Matt, which is you have an ongoing battle against the animal kingdom. Yes.

So now the new episode has occurred. But there's been a new incident. I got sprayed by a skunk for the first time. It's an unbelievable thing. It was not a direct spray, but it was a spray on my car. So I was coming home from dinner last night, got some great hoisters. And a skunk ran across the road. And there was a car coming in the other direction.

So I didn't swerve, but I slowed down. And I definitely thumped them a little bit, but it was not a fatal blow. So I'm looking at the rearview mirror, and I'm driving my wife's car. and I can see that he's kind of like stumbling away like a drunk squirrel type of thing. He's like just, you know, he definitely died later in the night. Whoa. You can't just casually say that. Like you don't seem sad at all.

Well, so anyways, so the crippled skunk is kind of stumbling away. And then I'm like, oh no, I start to smell it. So he definitely sprayed the undercarriage of the car. And so we were about to be home and I was like, well, we can't go home like this. You can't put a skunked car in your garage. So we drove to a car wash, which was closed. And so then we didn't know what to do. So I just parked the car down the street, parked it outside, walked home.

But the car got skunked. No. Were you able to get it off? Well, I haven't checked the car this afternoon when we're recording here. But as of this morning, the car was very much skunked. I mean, the skunk traded his life, and all he did in return was make your car smell bad. He might not have died. I mean, he might have just scurried to, like, the animal hospital after that.

It's possible that he made it. You seem pretty blasé about the survival odds of the skunk. I don't know. I might be with a skunk on this one. Yeah, you're with the skunk? I don't know. So I've been battling the animal kingdom here. Ever since I moved to the sub.

I'm a city guy. ever since I moved to the suburbs. I got turkeys, I got skunks, out of fox. It's just crazy. So, returning to the fireworks topic for a second, let me weave this into a future topic that we're going to address in this podcast, which is very important,

probably the most important news of the week. I heard once that during COVID, they canceled the fireworks in this town where Taylor Swift had a beach house. Really? Love it, artist Taylor Swift. And she got so mad about this that she just paid for the whole fireworks display. Really?

So she paid for everyone. I'm a big, I'm a Taylor Swift fan. It's a Swifty. So you might be sitting there thinking yourself, wow, what a magnanimous and non-scammy person she is. What an honest operator she is, clearing a billion dollars on this tour. Good for her. Turns out that's false. Turns out she's actually, she's worse.

We just got a piece of news in this week. Her partnership, she did sign a partnership with FTX. It was fake news that she backed out of the partnership. Fake news that she did better diligence than all the VCs. Taylor Swift actually did sign the partnership. So, you know, my campaign against Taylor Swift continues unabated. So there was this story a couple months ago that Taylor Swift was about to do a deal with FTX, but she backed out because she wanted to know more about the Howie test

and more about whether or not FTX was listing unregistered securities. And so she was discerning and she decided not to do the partnership. It turns out that she actually did sign the partnership and it was Sam Bankman-Fried that just didn't execute his side of it. And so Taylor Swift actually didn't actually care about the Howie Test, it turns out. Yeah. So because that was always a preposterous story. Obviously, Taylor Swift doesn't know anything about securities law. That's like a ridiculous thing. What does you know? I mean, come on, guys. I mean, there's probably a howie analysis to be done on the tickets for her tour, for God's sakes. I think that's a dot. Yeah, I mean, look, if some of these things that Gensler's saying are securities or really securities, then tickets

are probably securities too. I agree, because people buy them in some cases with the expectation of profit collectively. The investment's made with money. And there's the efforts of a third party. So frankly, Gensler, if you're listening, I know you listen to the show. I think you should investigate some of the funny business that's going on with Mrs. Swift over there. Or better yet, just go down to the Boston Garden before Bruins game. We get a bunch of guys from Revere scalping tickets.

Those guys are like the FTX equivalent of the unregistered security slingers. So I feel vindicated. I feel vindicated by this because I'm not a fan of Taylor Swift. I'll say it. I'll just go on record. Who isn't a fan of Taylor Swift? That's the most un-American view of hurt. I don't like her music.

It doesn't engage me. Oh, she puts out bad. Name one Taylor Swift song. Name one. I don't know if I can name one, but my wife has it on all the time. There's a lot of good ones. It's all about breakups and stuff. How many breakups can she possibly have?

That's what I don't get. Where is she getting the material? Is she just dating people so that she can write songs about them? That's what I think. Yeah, that's what I think. Because it's like industrial at this point. I mean, it's so many. Yeah, if you go into a relationship with Taylor Swift,

you know that you're just going to get dominated in two years. She's going to use you for content. Yeah. It's like masochistic. And these guys must know it at this point. They have to know that. she's going to use them for content. That's a decent trade-off.

So anyway, us haters of Taylor Swift are totally vindicated by this. It was actually Sam that saw through her veneer and realized she wouldn't be providing value for FTX, so he pulled out of the deal. He ran the Howie analysis on her. I would love to know why he didn't do that deal. I mean, he was doing deals with so many other celebrities. Why would you not want to do one with Taylor Swift? so I mean it's not like he's been shy like he's still giving interviews right so didn't he talk to

tiffany fong this week i mean he's been talking i mean he gave michael lewis a big interview recently i think he still talks to michael lewis another uh hated character on this podcast i i love michael lewis i think michael lewis is great i'm the biggest michael lewis hater on the planet i think i'm the number one a hater of michael you have such a such a strange and Michael Lewis that you think that Michael Lewis is somehow embroiled in this FTCS thing in a negative way? I do. We laid it out.

That is a fringe conspiracy theory. We made the case. He was there. He was in the room when it happened. He was getting the royalty treatment. He went to the Super Bowl. I don't think he was put in the back door from Alameda to FTCS.

I don't think Michael Lewis was that sophisticated. I think he's the missing link here. He's the guy. We need to, he has all the secrets. He knows everything. He's got the whole book. He wrote a book about this. I just can't wait. I can't wait for this trial. I can't wait to see some of these cast of characters, you know, Boston's own Sam Trebucco. Will he be making an appearance? Where is Sam? Where is he? Sam? Where is Sam? He's hiding. He's no, he's, I think he's being

protected by the federal government. That's the only explanation I can muster. So will we see him? Everyone else has reemerged in some way. And Sam Truvico is still we on, own on his boat is he on the boat there's other people that haven't emerged we haven't seen romnik emerge see now he's one of the people that you have a one-sided rivalry against and i actually didn't even know who he was well he was the head of corp dev he was the head of product he did all the venture capital raising he was a man of many hats over there so we had an episode of the podcast this week i interviewed jose LeMuse, the CEO of IBEX, which is a lightning startup for emerging markets.

Ibex, is that it's a type of animal that lives in the mountain? Is that what that is? Yeah, I think it's a kind of antelope, I believe, an ungulate, possibly. And is that what the company's named after? Yeah, I mean, it's on their logo. I don't know how you get from there. lightning. Yeah, Ibex is like a creature of the planes, I believe. So is lightning really growing in emerging markets? I would say it has a, yeah, it has a good chance of reaching product market fit there where the, you know, and their angle is that they are focused on multinationals. So they signed a partnership with Salinas Group, which is this big

conglomerate in Mexico and now you can pay for your TV subscription with Lightning and things like that. So they believe that Lightning has a better chance of reaching product market fit and emerging markets where the payment infrastructure isn't as good. What's the timeline on getting stable coins on Lightning, by the way? Good question. I've been thus far disappointed. I think Lightning Labs renamed their protocol, right? It was Taro. It was Taro. I think there was another company called Tarro or something. Tarree. Tarree.

Tseed them for infringement. Now it's just called Lightning Assets, I think. So, okay, I did look up Ibex. An Ibex is actually a species of wild goat. Well, they actually live all over the place. There's Siberian Ibexes, Alpine Albexes, Iberian Ibexes, Nubian Ibexes. Honestly, the way my summer is going,

with animals, I bet one of these things will be in my backyard. So the other day, speaking of animals, I went to this place called Jungle Island, which is, I guess, a zoo in Miami, a zoo of sorts. And I paid for the sloth experience, right? So you get to meet the slots, right? Okay. But it was the middle of the day. And as it turns out, the slots are sleeping in the middle of the day. That's what they do. Could you see them sleeping? Yeah. So even at the best of times, you know, dawn and dusk, they're active. They're not really doing much. In the middle of the day, they're completely zonked out. They want nothing to do with you. So I should have researched slots before I went because the experience was you just watch them sleeping. Was there any other animal to see?

Yeah. They were capy bars. That's the largest rodent. They had coffee bar. I should have done the, could have done the coffee bar experience. There were all sorts of like little monkeys. I could have done that experience. But I wrongly thought, okay,

the sloth experience would be the best one. Turns out they don't do it because they, you can't engage them. That's disappointing. They're not doing anything. I know. That's very disappointing.

I just do my market research. Bad luck with animals on this podcast. All right, let's hit some deals of the week here. First one up is Laser Digital, which is the digital asset subsidiary of Nomura. They have agreed to acquire a Chicago-based trading firm called Elysium Technology Group. Next up, we have Alloy X, a Defi startup. They raise $2 million from Hack VC.

Then we have OLA. This is a Web3 privacy firm. They raised $3 million from Forsight, LD, Capital, and Catcher VC. Then you have Web3 Go, a Blachor. blockchain company building AI tooling. They've yet to understand the overlap there, but it will figure it out one day. They raised $4 million from Binance Labs,

hashkey, NGC, and Shima Capital. Then we have Team Blackbird, which is the parent company of a crypto data platform. They raise $6.5 million from Atinum investment. Blackbird is also my favorite. plane. Oh, the Blackbird. Yeah.

Isn't there a book about that, the building of the Blackbird? Yeah. Skunk works, right? Skunk works, yeah. I mean, I think it covers it. Yeah. So here's the thing about the Blackbird. It is, I believe, still to this day, the fastest plane that was ever manufactured,

that was sort of like in production, right? And we designed it in the 50s. We designed it in the 50s. with slide rules. We didn't even have computers. Could we build the Blackbird today? I don't think so. I think we've lost that knowledge.

It's incredible. I've recently finally read the book, The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, which talks about the early days of the space program. And a lot of those guys were coming out of fighter. They were like fighter of pilots in World War II and in Korea. and then they were, a lot of them were tasked with just testing new planes. And the level of death was incredible.

I don't know if you'd have the appetite in this. People are dying left and right. Yeah. So you combine what you said with like in this day and age, I don't think there would be the appetite to just have people dying left and right on these things as you're building them. And yeah, I don't know. A lot of this innovation is not happening, I guess.

we have lost the industrial knowledge to build such things and we've lost the yearning to build such planes I mean what like what are we even building plane wise these days it's just a drone space SpaceX is like one of the most valuable companies on earth right yeah actually did I say on this show that I accidentally saw launch the other day did I mention that No. Okay, so I was sitting on the beach eating tacos at 8 p.m. Because my friend insisted, we have to go to the beach, we have to eat tacos. I'm like, okay, well, it's kind of nighttime.

And I just so happened to be looking north. And I saw what looks like this red plume. I'm like, wow, that's a really big firework. Like, what's going on? And I'm like, oh, my God, that's a rocket. And it was the falcon heavy. It was like the heaviest SpaceX rocket that had ever taken off. And you could see it.

We're 200 miles away from Cape Carnivore. Canaveral. And you could see it with the naked eye. It was actually incredibly bright from Miami. Wow. Incredible. So after that I downloaded an app so I can know when there's a new rocket launch. Oh, that's cool.

Yeah. The perks living in Florida. Leave it to Elon. All right. So let's hop into some quick news. It was not a busy news week with the holiday here in the United States, but some news out of the Celsius camp. So the CFTC is reportedly going to bring a case against Celsius

and its founder Alex Machinsky for a bunch of fraud stuff. I don't know. Not really shocked. I mean, if they didn't find something suspect, I'd be surprised. Yeah, again, this is just a report, so we'll see. But the report is the CFTC is going to do something against both the founder and his company. So we'll see. Next up, Citigroup is reviewing their digital asset custody partnership with Medico, the Swiss fintech firm.

After Medico announced that they'd be acquired by Ripple. Huh. I kind of like, I kind of get it. I mean, I get why you would review, you might not want to be doing business with Ripple if you're Citigroup. But I think this is a very interesting strategy for Ripple to just start acquiring like real businesses that spit off real revenue. So here's a weird thing about Ripple. Remember how Ripple's early vision was that XRP would be the bridge currency for remittances? Yes.

Right? And they would use exchanges as the Fiat. and off ramps to get to the last mile, and then the transactions would settle and they would clear through XRP. Yes. They were 90% correct about that. It just wasn't XRP as the bridge currency. They were wrong.

So this was the vision they laid out in like, what, 2012? Like very early. And then they were almost 100% correct with just the one small detail of no one wanted to use XRP as the bridge currency. and they would instead of use stable coins. The bridge currency thing, I was never a believer. So we had talked to a lot of startups building in the XRP ecosystem over the years. And at one point, I had passed on one.

This was years ago. This was probably like five years ago. And I said at this point, like we wouldn't be a good fit for it largely because I'm skeptical about XRP being used as a bridge currency for this service. You sent this in an email? I sent this in an email. and I you know it was a longer email I said a few other things which was the rest of it just personal insults no I said look thanks for taking the time at this point the reason for us passing is because I just don't think that

XRP is going to be the bridge currency and this was someone that was building something using XRP so well you were right you right but then I was nice about it and I said best of luck if I can blah blah so and then this guy came back and he said how about we used How about we use glazed donuts as our universal bridge currency or more conventionally a token? Best regards. That was just his answer. That was it. He proposed, how about if we use glazed donuts?

I want to be like, well, honestly, that would make more sense than XRP. Well, first of all, I love donuts and the SEC is never going to declare them a security. So they have that advantage. You never know with Gensler. Glazed donuts could be a security. You never know. They aren't as transmissible as a token, I would say. They're not.

They're reasonably fungible with each other. I mean, like, one, I'm a Duncan man. I love the Duncan plays donuts. I think it's an incredible product. It's the best. Yeah. It's really quite good. Not quite as good for settling international transactions.

At least you got a best regards out of it. So even though he was kind of mean, you did get his best regards. Yeah, no, I felt good about that. I felt good. And he, you know, it was a thought-provoking response that I still remember five years later. Sometimes I even go a little crazy and I give people my kind regards. Oh, you're a kind regards. Kind regards or warm regards.

That's why you really want to go to the next level. The convention of just best, like I'm kind of falling into that, but like what does it even mean? It's just like shorthand for best regards, best wishes. So best, it could be best afternoon. Yeah. Best, I mean, it's so ambiguous. Best what? It's very hard.

People, you know, in the olden days, people used to sign emails with, I remain your humble servant. That is like a Ben Franklin was prone to do. Our founding fathers would be, they would remain your humble servant. What happened to that? So many letters were retained from that era. It's just the communications of our political leaders will not be retained in that way anymore. No.

Everyone uses signal now. In fact, they're scared of the document retention. Yeah, in fact, the SEC apparently uses signal now. SEC. And you can be sure they're not signing off. I remain your humble servant. No. I remain your domineering overlord, in fact, is what they remain.

your nemesis is kind of the posture. Speaking of the SEC, there was a little bit of a kerfuffle after we recorded the podcast last week where news came out that the SEC was going to just quickly deny. That turned out not to be the case on these Bitcoin ETF. So they asked for more information on the surveillance sharing agreements. And in pretty short order, as far as I can tell, almost all of the issuers have responded and said, okay, this is a surveillance sharing agreement between Coinbase as a spot exchange. and then the platforms that are actually listing.

So CBOE would be one. And then the New York Stock Exchange being the other. So now we have these things on record. So the clock is ticking, right? Yeah, that was a really interesting case study of watching the market react to the news because the bots read the headline. And clearly they're not operating on GPD4 at this point. No.

Because the bots hated the headline. and then the humans actually read the article. And they're like, oh, this actually isn't so bad. This actually possibly it's, in fact, it's good. So we sold off and then we rallied. The bots, you know, I don't think AGI is here. They can't read the headline very well. It's true.

This is going to be really interesting. So then you had Larry Fink, who's, of course, the founder and CEO of BlackRock. He went on Fox business yesterday, and he talked about the Bitcoin ETF proposal. basically called it a hedge against a basement, called it, put it in the same bucket as gold, and said it was a global asset and gave probably a three-minute sales pitch for Bitcoin. I've just never seen anything like it. It's just incredible to me that this is now happening. People think that BlackRock, here's something that I hate.

On CryptoT Twitter, people think that BlackRock, because they're a large asset manager, will be buying Bitcoin on a proprietary basis. That's not how this works. Okay. Well, I mean, the listeners of this podcast know that. Well, they have to seed the product, so they'll buy a little bit on a proprietary basis. But their balance sheet is not very large

relative to the client assets. Correct. Like an ETF is a vehicle for clients to get exposure. It's not that they're just going to commandeer client assets and put them in that. this thing. Yeah, it's like the people, every time there's a scandal with a company and people are like State Street and BlackRock control this company. It's like, no, well, their customers own the stock. So the other thing is people seem mystified about BlackRock or they have these

conspiracies about them. And I get it. Like BlackRock has been one of the leading voices in ESG, for instance, and using their position, you know, exercising some control over corporates. and steering them towards the SG, although I think they're moving away from that now. But the folks I've interacted with on the digital asset team of BlackRock are super engaged and super aligned with the industry. So I've always been very optimistic, actually, about their entry. I mean, people were even saying things like, oh, BlackRock's going to use the ETF to turn Bitcoin into proof of stake because they're going to have a fork and then they have a

fork choice policy. The fork choice policy is in every asset managers risk disclosures. You have to reserve the right to pick a fork. You have to have that. So I'd never read into that. I think the interesting thing here is, so if this ETF gets approved and the other ones get approved, then you're going to have BlackRock and Fidelity and Bitwise and a number of other firms that have Bitcoin ETFs. And the custodians for these things are going to be fidelity and Coinbase, as far as I can tell.

unless there's another custodian listed, which I don't think there is. And it really begs a question, okay, so why can't large banks who are the, like the money center banks, why can't they custody this product? Why can't Bank of New York Mellon be the custodian for the BlackRock ETF? And the answer is SAB, Staff Bolton, 121, where Gary Gensler and the SEC are taking the posture that the banks need to treat these customer assets in the form of Bitcoin as if they were the assets of the bank. And so they have to hold them on balance sheet.

They have to hold them on balance sheet, which is insane and doesn't apply to any other asset class. And it's a complete mishandling of how this should work from a capital markets perspective. And as a result, you're going to have Coinbase, which I think is a great company, to be clear. And we, you know, we like Coinbase. But the SEC suing Coinbase and Coinbase is going to be the custodian for the Black BlackRock ETF.

It's just there's so many things about the way the SEC has approached this industry that make absolutely no sense and are at odds with with each other from a logic perspective I just found out about Saab 21 21 last week and I thought we talked about it. Yeah, it's not a good rule. I mean, it's basically the reason why all these banks are going so slow on their crypto custody initiatives and the the foreign banks are the ones that are actually crushing it. So the Namura is the standard charters of the world are actually leaps in bounds ahead of the U.S. banks here, even the ones that want to be doing things. And then, you know, you do have banks in the U.S. that have, like, built out teams, really talented organizations and have stuff that's ready to go. But then you have banks like Bank of America that are like nowhere near the starting line

and just have executive teams that don't get it. But, you know, it'll eventually this Sab 121 thing will get rolled back and you'll have someone in charge of the SEC that actually wants to promote capital. formation. Isn't it crazy that there's just this incredibly esoteric rule which basically completely walls off banks from touching digital assets and no one even knows about it. I mean, you and like a half dozen other people that pay attention to this stuff. I never heard of this thing. Turns out that's the reason banks literally can't touch its stuff. That's why I think this McKinrey Thompson market structure bill is so important to the future of the industry.

is just look at who is playing in the crypto industry right now. How many banks and how many broker dealers are actually playing? And they can't play because of this Sab 121 thing, which is totally dumb. And they can't play because it's unclear who regulates the spot market for a lot of these assets. And so the way to fix that is get rid of Sab 121 and then give clear guidance around what's a security, what's a commodity, how do you move from raising capital to decentralizing a protocol? then you just make it such that all these banks and broker dealers can turn on the switch and do custody, do trading, offer it to their customers.

It's a type of thing that honestly would 10x the level of participation in this industry. So I would think that that would be something that regulators would want to see. So I was watching the Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary on Netflix. Do you see this? I love that one. Yeah, that was great. It was very good. Actually, I was wondering myself, is there anybody else you can think?

think of that reached the pinnacle of three different domains. So for him, his bodybuilding, acting, and politics, he got as far as he could go in politics. Is there anybody else that succeeded in three totally disparate domains like that? I can't think of any. That's a good question. It would have to be like an athlete that does politics, but then that's only two, right? Like John Glenn went to, he went into orbit and then he was a politician. But that's only two. I mean, maybe he was also a fighter pilot or something. Yeah, he was actually. My question to you, Matt, here's my question to you.

Have you thought about pulling a Schwarzenegger and, you know, running on a campaign of repealing Saab 1-21, you know, parlaying your venture career into politics, running on a platform of anti-Counselor anti-121? I don't know. I haven't gotten to the top of my field in anything. like Arnold yet. I mean, I was not, I was not the best restructuring consultant,

and I was, I'm not the best VC yet. Yeah, I'm still climbing the hill. Well, you're a pretty good runner, right? Pretty good, pretty good,

not the best, pretty good, not the best, but fairly good. All right, well, we'll leave that one, you know.

But I think it's a, it's a basis for quite a political campaign, just I'm going to repeal all the stupid laws that exist. That's, I mean, I think people can get behind that. I mean, isn't that basically what McKenry is doing? Like, it's Amber, it's like these guys are, it's not like a radical view.

It's like, hey, let's take this thing that makes absolutely no sense and just let's make it make sense. What struck me about Schwarzenegger's governor campaign was he didn't have a platform, it appears. He just wanted to be governor. And through force of will, he became the governor. And then it turns out he's actually pretty good governor, right? The cigar thing, what a great idea. So he had a little tent and he had. right outside his office

in the outdoors side he had a tent erected and he would have people in just to smoke cigars with them and everyone wanted to be seen with the governor and it made it made me smoke those cigars that you got me two years ago actually I finally

I was corked them this is a Christmas present I was scandalized by this basically because you can't just smoke a two year old cigar that has been desiccated and not sitting in a humidor I did.

Matt didn't know about this, dear listener. Matt didn't know. He just smoked it like a savage. Yeah, no, it wasn't terrible. I mean, it was a little dry. There's just a way we do things in cigarly, and then you have to humidify it. I'm not a cigar guy.

You can't just go and dry it like that. But, you know, the idea that Schwarzenegger just smoked cigars all day long, it's incredible. Like, I don't know how you could, your breath must just reek. Yeah, my takeaway from that was it's astonishing that he's sort of 75 and kicking. I mean, he did all these anabolics when he was younger, and then he was just huffing scores constantly for his entire adult life.

How is he still in relatively good shape? I mean, how is he still chugging? What a life that guy is led. Very inspirational. Okay, last question before we wrap. July 20th coming up here. Two weeks, roughly. Barbie movie Oppenheimer come out on the same day.

Which one are you watching? Oh, Oppenheimer. But I've heard that people, it's like super emotional, right? Isn't it supposed to be a tearjerker? Oppenheimer or Barbie? Or is it like Oppenheimer? Isn't it like people are kind of like blown away? I mean, yeah, people are very much blown away by Manhattan Project.

Yeah, I don't think I'm going to do the Barbie one, but I'll do. Oppenheimer. I think I'm going to do a double-hitter. I don't think I want to go to the theater, though. Does it come out on streaming pretty quickly? What's wrong with the theater? You know, like the theater? I got two children.

They're not theater ready. They take them to Barbie, and then you go watch Oppenheimer. They're not ready for the theater? I don't think you can just drop off a one-year-old at a Barbie theater. I don't know how it works. It doesn't work like that. See you in two hours. Just enjoy the picture.

I can't wait for you to have kids. You just give them a large bucket of popcorn in a small Coke, and then they're just entertained for two hours. Just give them the seed oils and just put them into a torpor. That's true. The seed oils in the popcorn, it's not real butter. It's not real butter. It's just seed oils.

It's sludge. That's gross. I can't wait. I'm very excited for both films, to be clear. Well, we'll have to do a movie review on Oppenheimer. Pretty light week this week. So we'll see, you know, we get the price of Bitcoin is moving, though. So as I said on this, as I sort of alluded to with the BlackRock comment,

if it looks like these things are going to get approved, there's going to have to be some spot buying here on these products. And so you need to cede these ETFs with a little bit of capital. So the way I would think about that would be maybe on the order of magnitude of 25 to 75 million dollars of Bitcoin per issuer probably is what you'd have to have. That's a kind of a wide range guess of what you'd have to see. That's not that much though. It adds up though, right?

I mean, let's say it's $300 million worth of Bitcoin across the six sponsors. If you go market by $300 million of Bitcoin right now, that's going to move the market. This is like the halving debate though. everybody knows or everyone will know that the ETF is due. Let's say when we finally get an announcement. I think it could be a news selling event, actually. I'll be the contrary. And I think it could be a sell-the-news-style event.

I think 60% of the ETF probability has been priced in at this point. Yes, that you're rally when it's announced. The day of, day of listing, just like remember when CME futures launched on Bitcoin at the picot top. Top of the market, yeah. Pico, Pico, top. I think it's a new selling event the day of launch. It could be. But I mean, the flip side of that is just think about the pools of capital that would be able to buy the ETF. And so you have all this money that's in tax advantage accounts right now that can only be in GBT. And it's just another way to get long Bitcoin.

Then you have some market participants that can't buy physical Bitcoin because they're, you know, the fact that it's a commodity is an issue for their investment mandate. But they could buy a Bitcoin ETF since it's a secure. I think there's a lot of capital that would flow into this. Well, I think that's it for the week. Hopefully there's more news next week and less skunk-related conversations. But we have to do the podcast every week. We have to say something. Yeah, it's like a blockchain.

It's just the blocks and the podcast episodes. They keep on coming. Sometimes they're empty blocks. I mean, this is the equivalent of an empty block. Yeah, well, thanks for hanging in. there. Everyone have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.