On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/24/26 (BTC Security Consortium, Genesis' Terra trade, DAT departures, Farewell to BitMEX, Network State drama) (EP.731)

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Nic and Matt are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  The Fat Model Thesis Are OAI and Anthropic in real trouble with Kimi? The Bitcoin Security Consortium is announced to tack...le quantum risk Galaxy announces their Quantum Readiness Initiative Clarity is beleaguered in Washington Polymarket and Kalshi keep feuding The SEC settles with Coinbase over Gensler's lost text messages We uncover some new documents revealing that Genesis inadvertently kicked off the UST depeg Jack Mallers leaves the XXI Capital DAT Movement Labs declares bankruptcy BitMEX finally winds down their exchange Balaji's Network State is unceremoniously evicted from of Malaysia The SEC warns about crypto vaults Matt comes around on soccer

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Starting point is 00:00:00 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 as 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.
Starting point is 00:00:27 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.
Starting point is 00:00:50 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. We're both recording this in suboptimal conditions. Hopefully this will come out tomorrow. Yeah, I'm in the middle of nowhere in Spain. Wi-Fi is not great for either one of us. I was just doing a Galaxy Digital show,
Starting point is 00:01:12 and Alex said he listens to our show every single week. I heard that. So I didn't know he's been doing Galaxy Brands for five years now. This show is almost at its eighth years, and he said he listens every week. And so in that moment, I thought to myself, well, you know what? maybe we should keep doing it.
Starting point is 00:01:32 There's at least one guy out there that listens every week. There is. There's a stable of listeners that listen every week. I'm always surprised at who comes up and says, thank you for doing the podcast. So yeah, that's what makes you battle through
Starting point is 00:01:46 when you have suboptimal Wi-Fi. I feel like we're in, I don't know, 2001 right now with our Wi-Fi connections, but we'll power through. I actually, I listened to that Galaxy Brains podcast when I was on my morning run today. quite a good podcast. Oh, what the one I did like yesterday?
Starting point is 00:02:04 Yeah, the one you did yesterday. Talking about AI, talking about quantum. Some good points in there about AI. I do think that these labs who just are basically making a business. Obviously, they're building frontier technology, but they're just monetizing inference. And they're going to try to kill the open source community. Yeah, and I think it's kind of fun.
Starting point is 00:02:28 because everybody got it in their heads that being a token merchant, you can just make infinite, you make hundreds of billions of dollars just selling tokens. And maybe that's not true, you know, maybe it didn't turn out to be that way. And maybe the frontier models aren't as defensible. You don't have as much of a moat as you thought. That doesn't bother me that much, you know? But I think it really offends people because maybe, you know, everybody's exposed to opening eye and anthropic on the capital side. But, you know, nothing has ever promised, right? You're not guaranteed a business model. So if it turns out that being a frontier lab means you have to monetize in some other way, I think that's fine. I think it's actually good, frankly.
Starting point is 00:03:17 Like, my official view now is that the Kimmy did the world a favor, actually. And I think the question is what is that business model? So if it's not just like seat-based revenue for the Anthropic and Open AIs of the world, what is it? And I suspect that pushing into like the medical space, drug discovery is going to be part of Anthropics go forward. But I am curious where open AI goes. I mean, you think about it. It's like, look, you build this frontier technology. You can either rent it out or you can use it for your own good and you can see what type of business model you can build on top of it. And I suspect there's a lot of it. And I suspect there's a lot of them. Well, if the model layer ends up being thin, like, you know, we had the fat protocol
Starting point is 00:04:03 thesis, right? Now we, and then we had the fat model thesis, which maybe that's not true. If the model layer is thin, you can still own the infrastructure. You can still actually manufacture the tokens, right? And that's kind of what open eye is doing. They're verticalizing. So they, much more so than Anthropic or verticalizing. Anthropics seems to be going the direction of, well, let's create a biolab and let's get these forward deployed engineers
Starting point is 00:04:32 embedded. So now maybe they're going to monetize the discoveries, which I think is great. You know, make discoveries. That's great. I think that's also a good business model. I mean, it could be a, honestly, it could be a much more lucrative one. But in any event, a good pod there with Thorne.
Starting point is 00:04:48 Should we hop into the deals of the week? Yeah, first up, a big deal, Augustus. they're a stablecoin native bank. There is 180 million from Tiger Global, QED, and others. Then it's digital asset. This is the company behind the Canton Network. They have raised $10 million in a round from standard chartered ventures and Shin Han Financial Group. And we have the tie. They're a digital asset, data and infrastructure company. They've acquired staking rewards, a provider of staking and yield data. Then it's notabene, a stablecoin payments network and compliance.
Starting point is 00:05:22 appliance software company, they announced a strategic investment from Ripple. So a little bit of a slow deal week, huh? But not short on news. So there is a new consortium. A new consortium has hit the tape. Love consortiums. I know everyone was making fun of the OUSD consortium, but there is actually another consortium now with all of the, all of the biggest names in crypto. It's called the Bitcoin Security Consortium. It's Coinbase, BlackRock, Fidelity, Block, and many others. So the objective, as far as I can tell, is I think they've collectively committed $15 million. The objective seems to be to fund basically quantum research in Bitcoin. Yes.
Starting point is 00:06:13 I'm very excited to see this. I'm glad. I think this is exactly what it takes, because we do have this kind of tragedy of the commons issue. everyone benefits from Bitcoin, but nobody wants to step up and do the hard work to make Bitcoin work, especially around a novel problem. And I think this is exactly the right kind of thing. And I like what they did with this consortium, because some of these consortiums, you get trapped down in governance. And what these guys have said is that we're each going to make our own financial decisions. So we're committing a certain amount of capital to Bitcoin security, but we will decide who gets it and how to deploy it. I think that makes a likelihood of success a lot higher here.
Starting point is 00:06:55 And so the Black Rocks of the world, the Fidelity of the world can go off and fund their own, you know, ecosystem partners to do this, which is a smart idea. And I have been saying for a long time, I thought if nothing happened at the dev layer, eventually the largest firms in Bitcoin would do something. They're doing something. Yeah. So it's happening. there is another quantum readiness initiative announced this week, courtesy of Galaxy,
Starting point is 00:07:25 who is also part of the consortium. So they're just doubling up on the quantum stuff. So I want to give them an extra special shout out. So the Galaxy has their own, in parallel, the Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative, up to 5 million in developer grants for post-quantum solutions, ongoing research, and their own quantum advisory council to rival, coin basis. So Shadow Galaxy, I mean, they're actually more of an AI company now. If you look at what, what are the constituents of their market cap? It's more about their AI initiative. So I'm very
Starting point is 00:08:01 glad to see that they're still doing crypto stuff and that they're doing this philanthropic work. You know, I was speaking of quantum. I was talking to someone that I very much respect this week about just what the world is going to look like over the next few years, if indeed quantum happens. And the part I didn't appreciate it, although I probably should have, is that the hardware upgrades here are going to be monumental. Like a ubiqui as they exist today does not work in the post-quantum world. Our laptops will need to be, you know, upgraded. So I think you're talking about just like a major hardware upgrade cycle here that's on the horizon. Yeah, every aspect of the stack.
Starting point is 00:08:42 People forget it's not just the protocol. It's everything. It's even the front end interface. It's the physical hardware. And there's some types of hardware where the cryptography is burned into it and you can't upgrade it like satellites in some cases. Oh, is that right? Internet of Things devices.
Starting point is 00:09:03 Yes, in some cases the cryptography is burned into it. So there is no upgrade possibility. Huh. So what do you do with all those satellites? We've got to take them down and put new ones back up there, it sounds like. Yeah, a lot of them, we've got to wait for them to fall out of the sky and then send new ones. Wow. All right. Well, that was big news. The other news here, and this is news every week, but the Clarity Act, so this thing was bogged down for a while here on ethics provisions. Maybe it still is bogged down on
Starting point is 00:09:34 the ethics provisions, but there's been some compromise language introduced by the Republican side. Pretty comprehensive. I mean, it would ban presidents and federally elected officials. from launching coins, from profiting, from digital assets that they issue. You know, it's sunset in 2029, and it would not apply to things that are already issued, although you would have to divest out of those tokens that you're the sponsor of, or you need to put them in a blind trust. So this looks like it is a, to me, this is a very good compromise. I mean, I think this covers a lot of the critiques.
Starting point is 00:10:16 It'll be interesting to see if this is enough to get it done. And five minutes before we turned on the recorder here, Senate Majority Leader John Toon said he doesn't think we're going to be able to get this done before the August recess. So time's running out, but I don't know. I don't know if time's actually out if we get to August. It could theoretically get taken back up, but it seems like it'll be a very busy week in Washington. Yeah, I mean, it's actually trading better than I would have thought. So the polymarket has it at 37% odds of passing this year, which based on the discourse I've
Starting point is 00:10:54 read it, my interpretation one is it was dead as a doornail. So someone out there thinks that there's still a glimmer of hope here. I mean, there's a lot of positive signal. Like you had the ethics language come out. You had Patrick Witt, who was called into the National Guard. they put his service on hold, and so he's not going. He's trying to get this over the line.
Starting point is 00:11:18 And you have people on both sides of the aisle that are saying, hey, look, we're working on this, we're trying to get it done. I think you also have this looming specter of Fair Shake, which Scaramucci was on CNBC this week, and he brought this up, and I've been thinking it. I was glad he brought it up. But, you know, if you're a Democrat and you're generally pro-crypto,
Starting point is 00:11:38 you don't want to have this be the issue in your race. in October, November time period. And Fershak hasn't deployed a lot of their capital. So I think this, like the money and politics angle here also plays pretty large, I think. Did you read this New York Times article about the polymarket Kalshi rivalry? I did not. What did they say? So there's no love loss between these firms.
Starting point is 00:12:06 Let's just say that. The New York Times reported this week that before. the FBI raid on Shane, Kalsh's lawyers met with federal prosecutors in Manhattan to raise concerns about polymarket. So, wow. They pointed out the obvious, which was that a lot of non-U.S. people were using,
Starting point is 00:12:31 or a lot of Americans were using Polymarket, which at that time had no U.S. element. So they're plain dirty. that's uh that's not a good fact huh i mean that's not going to win them the hearts and minds although i guess if you're just a sports gambler you probably don't follow it that closely yeah i mean i probably would have done that frankly if i was running calci probably just corporate uh corporate warfare here's something i thought was interesting um the cc has settled a lawsuit with coinbase over a Freedom of Information Act request. They have agreed to pay Coinbase $150,000 and overhaul their
Starting point is 00:13:14 record retention practices after admitting that they wiped out a full year of Gary Gensler's text messages that were sought in evidence to an Operation Choke Point 2.0 related lawsuit. Paul Grewell, the Coinbase's CLO penned an op-ad about this in the Wall Street Journal. This is just such a ridiculous scandal here that Gary Gensler had his little minions at the SEC just wipe out all of his text messages and blow out all the evidence and just it's 150k at a coin base sorry you know we don't know what was in these things but talk about a dirty player that Gary Gensler yeah it is weird that we keep operation choke point two point two point oh keeps coming up on our desk because we keep getting more and more
Starting point is 00:14:02 vindicated. I mean, there was the cracking thing with the accounting aspect. Now we have, you know, this really sketchy thing where Gensler's text messages went missing. So credit to Coinbase for fighting this at the time and for still fighting, you know, years later. Big credit to them. All right. So I have something that's kind of interesting. Do you want to talk about Taraluna? Sure, yeah. Why not? Yeah, while we're reminiscing. So I don't even know if people are going to be remembering this. But when Terra Luna depagged, there was a lot of chatter in the industry that the reason why UST depegged was because they were going to build this Bitcoin buffer.
Starting point is 00:14:48 And everyone's kind of like, all right, well, maybe it's just people lost confidence because if you actually had to be backed by Bitcoin, then it draws more attention to the fact that this thing is a perpetual motion machine. It's not backed by anything. And there's been chatter in the industry around the specific trends. action that took place that actually did depeg Terraluna. And I think I have a little bit of information that would lead me to believe I know what that trade was. Yeah, because at the time, everybody was totally focused on defy and looking at the three pool and the four pool and the
Starting point is 00:15:20 loss of liquidity from the three pool or like there must have been some entity that was attacking Terraluna, like it can have collapsed under its own weight. There was an attacker. But I think the truth, which you're about to reveal here, is actually they did it to themselves. Yeah, I think that's right. So there's this ongoing New York lawsuit against digital currency group and Genesis related to the, basically the collapse of that entity. And as part of the discovery for that lawsuit, there is an investment memo written by Ribbet Capital. So Ribbitt Capital has had at the time a $278 million position in DCG. So they had put 278 million of DCG equity to work. They had 3.42% of that business.
Starting point is 00:16:15 They wrote a situation overview as this collapse was happening, actually post-Luna collapse. So this was in June 2022 when Genesis was kind of on the ropes. And I'm just going to read you the excerpt here. Situation overview. Over the last few months, Genesis has taken a significant amount of risk across his trading slash lending book. Bullet point one, Luna trade. Genesis took a $38.8 million net loss liquidating exposure of 300 million of U.S.T.
Starting point is 00:16:49 originating with a spot OTC trade with LFG on April 20th, 2022. Genesis sold one billion of Bitcoin to LFG over four tranches. Genesis began to work out of the trade from U.S.T. to U.S.D. but had a remaining 300 million of U.S.T on May 9th when asset began depegging. To get out of the position, Genesis was able to sell U.S.T. at 96 cents on the dollar on May 9th. I mean, that just feels like confirmation that what we'd been hearing is right. Yeah, I mean, I thought this.
Starting point is 00:17:25 was true based on the oral history, but now we've got it written down. This is actually the first time I've ever seen confirmation is Luna was trying to shore up their reserves by adding this Bitcoin position, but that ironically was what killed them. They bought the Bitcoin for UST. Genesis was on the other side of that trade. They sold them the Bitcoin. They immediately had all this UST. They want to get rid of it, trade it into tether. they're liquidating it to tether and that is the straw that breaks the camel's back. They lose money on the trade. UST. DPEGs.
Starting point is 00:18:05 There's no attacker. There's no bad guy out there that's, you know, there's none of that, no conspiracy. Tara Luna did it to themselves. The crazy thing if you look at Genesis here is, so they kind of kickstart this with the Luna thing. And then the second bullet here, and I won't. won't read the whole thing, but Genesis had extended $2.4 billion of open term loans to three arrows capital. And a bunch of these were, they just weren't collateralized enough. So, you know, they throw Luna out and then three arrows has the exposure to Luna. It's just a
Starting point is 00:18:42 domino from there. Yeah, and I remember talking to folks at Genesis. I'm not going to name names. So I remember talking folks at Genesis at the time. And the loss on the trade against Luna spooked them and it just got worse from there. It just got worse and worse. And the three arrows thing was much worse, materially worse, than there was Alameda.
Starting point is 00:19:06 It was just one thing after another. And how any lender, I mean, of course, Genesis didn't make it. How any lender survived this chaos is incredible to me. It's unbelievable that some of them made them through. I mean, it's a small list.
Starting point is 00:19:23 So that's, you're not going to hear that on another podcast. Not everyone goes trawling through filings the way, in lawsuits, the way Matt does. Props are digging that up. In Dat News this week, there was more dat news. It wasn't good, though, in case you're wondering. 21 Capital, that's the second largest Bitcoin Dat with over 43,000 Bitcoin. Jack Mallor, as a CEO, has resigned. And he'll be focusing full-time on his payments company, Strike.
Starting point is 00:19:51 XXXI shares are down a huge amount. Of course, from the highs. There was a related party transaction that was contemplated, strike to XXI to buy strike. I believe that's off the table. Jack has retreated and he's just now working on his startup again. Is there a bigger story here? Is this just kind of like going to happen to every debt
Starting point is 00:20:15 that the original CEO is going to say, I don't want to do this anymore? Well, I mean, he could have, held firm and bled it out for a lot you know collected asset management fees for a couple more years honestly credited jack for realizing the jig was up and for stepping back more people in his shoes should do that meanwhile strategy across the water they sold some more MSTR they sold $263 million to raise cash they're not buying bitcoin. Sailor seems to have spent his time making his position clear on the filters debate.
Starting point is 00:20:54 It's unbelievable. This guy has just an unbelievable ability to raise capital. You've got to tip your cap to him. But $263.5 million of at the money common equity sales into this thing. He should get some kind of a record on that. In other news, movement labs, we haven't talked much about this on the podcast. This is just a trend wreck of a project.
Starting point is 00:21:18 and a lot of accusations of fraud and things like that. It was an Ethereum Layer 2 network built on the Move programming language. They have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It's a year of turmoil for these guys included a market-making deal that dumped a bunch of tokens, the ouster of the co-founder of the company. What did you make of this? Yeah, I mean, this one was a mess from the start, right? There were red flags all over the place.
Starting point is 00:21:46 I actually didn't know that blockchains could go ban. bankrupt. So that's the new thing. No, but the fact that these guys are the first ones to declare bankruptcy leads me to believe that there's something I'm missing, that they've found some sort of a scam. There's got to be some angle here, frankly. Also, did you see this week, speaking of bankruptcy, not exactly, but Bitmex has finally wound down kind of an end of an era, frankly. I mean, Bitmex invented the perpetual swap. This is more evident. for my theory that I'm developing that even if crypto didn't win in the way that the
Starting point is 00:22:24 crypto enthusiasts wanted necessarily, crypto has won a grand cultural victory. And I think Bitmex is a great example of this. Yeah. I mean, just one of the true OG cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges existed before Binance, before the current crop of big firms. Arthur Hayes, And this had been on the block for a while. So they had a banker in there trying to sell this thing. And it's interesting to me that there wasn't a market to buy it. I guess it's probably just worth more because they have the insurance fund. So they can just kind of gracefully wind down.
Starting point is 00:23:04 There's a lot of cash there. So it's probably worth more to just wind it down. But here's what I want you to think about. Yes, BIMX is gone, at least the exchanges. They invented the perpetual swap effectively, right? I mean, that was them. Yeah. And now that's everywhere.
Starting point is 00:23:20 It's absolutely everywhere. Correct. And everybody knows what it is. People are used to it. All the big guys are trading it. So even in our times of loss, there is still a great victory to be claimed. Wouldn't you say? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:36 Yeah, I would say that the perpetual swap is probably the first example of something that was introduced and invented in the cryptocurrency market that got exported to the real. real world and is now just something that is becoming a like a bigger financial instrument outside of crypto. So I would agree with that. Would you say the AMM is another example of that? AMM is a good example. Yeah. You know, Bankor first and then Uniswap. I mean, really productize in crypto for the first time. The synthetic dollar, I mean, obviously that has existed in other context, but the Delta Neutral Dollar, that actually originated on Bitmex back in the day. So just a real institution and it's sad to see him go but that's speaking of institutions have you been
Starting point is 00:24:25 following the network state drama in Malaysia I actually have been following this maybe you should just say what the network state is because I doubt a lot of people are following this well first of all it's a book the balladji wrote basically advocating for people to create online spaces to gather and do business and network, and then eventually turn those online spaces into real meat world, meat space spaces. And the first one, I would argue,
Starting point is 00:25:00 was this place in Malaysia, which is Forest City, Malaysia, which is kind of near Singapore, but it's not quite there. And it's this sort of Chinese real estate development that went wrong. And so they had all this extra supply of apartments and stuff, and it was kind of pristine but totally abandoned.
Starting point is 00:25:18 And so Ballagia got all those people together there. Everything was going great until, I guess, did they violate Malaysian immigration law? Or was it a moral panic? Do you have a view? They're accused of it. I think there was like a panic situation in the country around where there is Israeli citizens at these, like, Israeli citizens that were in the country illegally. That seemed to be what it was about, right? Yeah. So I didn't know this. We've actually done business in Malaysia,
Starting point is 00:25:55 which we'll talk about, but I didn't know this, but apparently Israelis are not allowed to visit or get a visa in Malaysia, which is a majority Muslim country. It's unclear to me whether duels, if you're a dual citizen, can you enter on your other passport? So that seems to have been the with the network state. And there was kind of a social media storm that developed and Malaysian netizens became very incensed over, I guess a couple dual citizen Israelis in the country as part of the network state,
Starting point is 00:26:28 which of all the things to get upset about that, doesn't seem like something worth getting very upset about. But then they got raided and there was no evidence of any of those people there. So I don't know what to make of it. Yeah, I mean, in my view, I think it was a bit of a moral panic, a very kind of conspiracy-rilled panic. Somehow the government was mobilized and the police sprayed them, the immigration authorities. And then eventually Malaysia said, well, that's it.
Starting point is 00:26:59 The network's sake. They're done. You can't do business here anymore. A lot of people said it was ironic because, you know, Ballagy's whole thing is, well, we're going to transcend the rules of the world. find us and we're going to create new rules and we'll find these particular enclaves where we can live according to our new doctrines and we're not going to be beholden to you know these sovereign states under the westfilling model anymore this seems to be a pretty strong counter example like it really does depend where you are and what they're what they think
Starting point is 00:27:34 but i'm also sympathetic having done business in malaysia i can't recommend it to people I don't recommend it. If you want to start a new country, I would recommend doing it in the West. I would do it in the West. You're much less likely to be killed. I would start it in America. You know what? Start in America, probably nothing bad will happen.
Starting point is 00:28:00 I wouldn't do it in a, let's call it, a frontier market. Well, I think Balogies going to Kazakhstan next. So I don't think he's heeding that advice. So I did see that. I looked into it, Jews are allowed to visit Kazakhstan, so that's already an upgrade. Oh, that's good. Yeah. Because I think if you're starting a new country, you probably want to talk to the Israelis. I mean, they did do it. You'd probably want like the best and brightest. Those are like the guys to consult when it comes to starting a new country from scratch. That's true. That's true. Yeah,
Starting point is 00:28:38 they've done it recently. All right, we somehow we miss this at the outset. Um, I wanted to talk about crypto vaults here. So the SEC through Commissioner Perse put out a warning this week that crypto vaults and on-chain lending strategies can fall under securities law when a curator or manager exercises discretion over where the deposits go. The wording that she had here was telling builders that they will have a, quote, painful fall if they can torture the rules to argue otherwise. That all makes sense to me.
Starting point is 00:29:11 And I actually think that there is this kind of wild west emerging here in the vault space. And so getting in front of this will probably prevent a lot of catastrophes in the future. I think we've got to have a market structure in this vault landscape. Yeah, this makes complete sense to me. Unfortunately, you're not going to be able to get away from the realities of if you're engaging in, you know, managerial discretion. The SEC might have an interest in that. Yeah, and this is going to be a much bigger category as real-world assets get tokenized, immobilized into these vols. There's going to be tokens issued on top of that.
Starting point is 00:29:50 And you just have to have a regulated entity exercising discretion there. Well, what's your verdict on the World Cup in the end? Did you watch the final that? I watched the second half of the final. And I found myself pulling for Argentina. That is, you know, that actually tracks because you're a Patriots fan, and so you would go for the guys that everyone hates. Oh, were they, everyone hates them? I thought they were, like, I thought everyone loves Messi. Yeah, but the Argentines over the course of the tournament kind of, they didn't win any goodwill, and they became widely hated with their antics.
Starting point is 00:30:30 Oh, I didn't know that. There's a lot of individual Argentines that I love, but when it comes to soccer, over the course of the tournament, they did develop a bit of reputation. that red card was just fatal there that that guy got and then you have to go a man down and so i would have just pulled the goalie like hockey style you got to get the goalie out of there and make a run but i mean how you expected to win a man down i hate to give you props when it comes to soccer but your critique of soccer as a fundamentally boring sport was very much foul it was you've vindicated in that final i mean yes it was dull yeah it was dull but i'm excited to do you do this again in four years. Would you say we're in Portugal next? Yeah, Portugal and Spain and Morocco.
Starting point is 00:31:16 And then Saudi. Yeah. Okay. And then America. So I heard they're going to they're going to make the field bigger so that the U.S. can be in it every year. I mean, the U.S. shouldn't have any trouble qualifying. We have to be like Panama or, you know, British Virgin Islands or something. I think we're going to need a full reh haul. I realize that the, and I guess it makes sense that the coach of the U.S. isn't even an American? No. Yeah, many such cases. We don't have anyone that can teach soccer, basically, in the United States. It is sad, but it's true.
Starting point is 00:31:50 You kind of need a grizzled veteran who's been around the block, and the U.S. just doesn't have those guys, unfortunately. So we have to go and hire a mercenary. Well, yeah, I thought it was generally a... I came around maybe like three or four degrees in soccer. Yeah. And that's progress. I'm not like fully there.
Starting point is 00:32:12 Yeah, it's progress. I'd say, it counts. You know, 30 years, I'll be there. Yeah, we'll win you over. Yeah. I thought we showed well. You went to one of those games, right? I was at the England-Norway game as an England fan that was peak experience.
Starting point is 00:32:25 And then, of course, we lost terribly the next game. But, you know, the Norwegians, they're good people. They're really just great guys and sporting. And there were no fights. when I go to a soccer game I expect there to be a fist fight. And when you go to European soccer game, there's always fights. Everybody was well behaved. It was really a tremendous experience.
Starting point is 00:32:49 Well, I like those Norway guys with the, they were doing like the rowing in all the parking lots. You even had them up here in Boston, just a bunch of guys doing the rowing thing. There was one Norwegian guy that didn't participate in the rowing because he said it was not historically accurate, which I really actually resonated with that guy. that's the kind of pedantic position. I would be staking out too. Credit to him. Yeah. Like he's actually really honoring the history.
Starting point is 00:33:18 That's right. Yeah, you only row over the fjords at short distance, but if you're going overseas, you're not... You sail. Yeah, you sail. Yeah. If you're going up the river, you have to row. But otherwise you sail.
Starting point is 00:33:29 Right. So that guy was right. All right. Well, I think that is it for the week. We'll see how this one comes out. I'd say the Wi-Fi. I would give the Wi-Fi on both of our sides a D minus, maybe a fail.
Starting point is 00:33:40 That is it for the week. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.

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