On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/26/24 (Bitcoin Nashville, ETH ETFs launch, Karate Combat recap) (EP.548)

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Nic recaps his Karate fight The Bitcoin Nashville conference Kamala's crypto posture A new pension fund is buying Bitcoin Did we get a soft landing? Content mentioned: BVNK, The decade of digital dollars Sponsor notes: The Launch of Ether ETFs In Coin Metrics State of the Network Issue 269, we look into ETH ETF fees, Grayscale funds and demand & supply dynamics heading into Ether ETF Launch

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. Guest 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.

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

So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brinkum, Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought to you by Coin Metrics, and here is a lot of the the Metrics Minute. For today's Metrics Minute, we're looking at the launch of spot Ether ETFs that went live this week. Nine spot Ether ETFs launched on July 23rd, with management fees ranging from 15 to 250 basis points. Gray Skills EFEE moved 10% of its $10 billion

of AUM into its new low fee Ethereum mini-trust, reducing ETHE Holdings by 300k units. Day one saw 106 million in net inflows, led by BlackRock's ETHA, while Grayscale's ETHE experienced 484 million outflows. Despite recent inflationary pressures, Ethereum's supply remains deflationary at minus 24 basis points since the merge. Ethereum's performance relative to Bitcoin has been consolidating since 2021, with the ETHBDC ratio at 0.052, down from a high of around 0.084 around the time of the merge. That is your metrics minute. All right. So we're going to talk more about the Ethereum ETF launches, but I guess before we do, big congratulations. You are now a 1 and 0 as a professional fighter. That was an exciting night. Thank you. Thank you. We got the dub last night.

It's been a long road, man. Five months of training. You know that. A lot of missed Zoom calls and things like that. We got the knockout in under a minute. So thank God that's over. incredible it was a it was a great fight so it was a liver kick that really did the job there it seemed like yeah um you know i'd been training my kicks and i think virtually none of the other influencers on karate combat had thrown any kicks really and uh i was a soccer player my whole life and i knew i had it in me and i trained a lot in wai and i got him with a really good knee to the body when we're in the clinch and uh i know that that gasses you out because i've had those before and I got him with a liver kick. He opened up. He turned away from me, nailed him with a

liver kick, and I think that just collapsed him and caught him with the right hook after that. And then he went down, some ground and pound. They stopped the fight in under a minute. I'm very glad they did because I did not want to fight three rounds. I was tired. Incredible. What was the scene like there? So RFK was actually in the announcing booth. I don't know if you saw that, but he was ringside and then they brought him in to actually call some of the other fights. Yeah, it was surreal. Yeah, RFK called some of the pro fights. I mean, what a crazy world we live in.

It was, you know, karate combat gets bigger every time. And it's interesting, you know, like they have the influencer fights. They have the pros. Everyone's always kind of baffled by having sort of untrained influencers on the same card as literally professionals. Like I was in the locker room next to Al Jermaine Sterling, who's one of the best UFC bantam weights of all time. And I was like, what's going on? I'm a random guy. I trained combat sports for five months,

and this guy is one of the best fighters in his division ever. And he was giving me advice. And so it's a really kind of funny juxtaposition, but I think it works. And yeah, there's a big buzz. Every fight's bigger. So the Singapore one is going to be huge, too, in September. Now, what's the scene like down in Nashville for the Bitcoin Conference?

I guess the big day is today. We're recording on a Friday, actually. big days today and then I guess tomorrow. So Trump is speaking tomorrow at the conference. Yeah, Trump's speaking tomorrow. I think Trump's appearance kind of salvaged the conference a little bit. That brought a lot of energy back to it. 20,000 attendees.

Nashville is full of bit corners, that's for sure. Can't go 10 yards without finding them. I've never been in Nashville before. This town is crazy. Yeah, it's a great city. Yeah, it's a really nice city. They call it Hillbilly Vegas, I think. No disrespect to Nashville.

I think it's great. There is no live music to be found anywhere in Miami. You can't go 10 yards without finding a bar with live music. It's 11 a.m. and people are in the bars already. I don't understand what's going on. It's crazy. It really is crazy.

So do you think we're going to see some big announcements this week? I guess I was hoping that we would have a couple already, but the rumor is that Trump's speech will call for having Bitcoin as a strategic reserve. That's kind of the rumor going around that next. Yeah, at the risk of saying something that will be immediately invalidated tomorrow, I don't think that's going to happen. I think that would be politically unwise. I think it would just give his opponents a lot of room to attack him. People do think that's going to happen? I don't think so. I know Cynthia Lomas has said she has a bill to that effect. I don't expect Trump to actually endorse it or he might say something positive about it, but I would be very, very shocked if you actually announce a strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Well, a lot to talk about in the Bitcoin front. Why don't we talk a little bit about Castle Island content? So I sat down with Representative French Hill this week.

We talked about digital asset legislative agenda. Talked about Sab 121, market structure bill, stable coins. Incredibly smart guy. Very fortunate to have politicians that spend the time to actually understand the space, the Emmer's, the McHenry's, you know, French Hill right at the top of that list. Yeah, thanks for doing that. We're lucky to have him. And he talked about, he's been an advocate for Tigran, the Biden's executive unlawfully detained in Nigeria, which we've talked about on this show as well.

I think he went to visit him, I think, right? He did go to visit him. Yeah. So we talked about that on the podcast. And he, that's a real, that is not getting enough attention. So Tigran Gambarian is still in custody over in Nigeria. Has malaria, like was wheeled in in a wheelchair to his hearing last week. Very sad story.

Very unfortunate, yeah. And French is fighting a good fight there. So really grateful for his efforts in Washington. There are a lot of deals this week. Should we hop in? Yeah, let's hop in. Two Castle Island deals to start us off. First one is Nirvana.

This is a blockchain cloud infrastructure company. They raised $4 million. We co-led the round with RW3 Ventures and hash 3. Big congrats to the Nirvana team. really excited about them. Also in the Siv portfolio, Kintu, defy infrastructure company in the Monad ecosystem. There is 4 million from us,

CMS, Brevin Howard, CMT, Breed, and others. Going to hear more and more about Monad in the coming weeks and months here from the Castle Island side. So Monad is a big focus area for us. We're obviously investors in Monad. Kinsu is our first infrastructure play

in that category as well. So psyched about Kinsu. So next up we have Caldera. They are a roll-up as a service platform. There is 15 million from founders fund, Dragonfly, and Sequoia. Then it's Igloo. This is the parent company of the NFT brand Pudgy Penguins. They're building an L2. They raised 11 million from Founders Fund, Fendbushi, 1KX, and a number of others. Pretty remarkable, actually. Of all the NFT projects, it feels like Pudgy made it out of the NFT bare market the best. They've actually achieved something meaningful here. It's quite impressive.

Yeah, they've really done a great job executing over there. NFTs just went into the doghouse post-FTX. I think there's still a lot of promise with the technology. And I think there's going to be some really interesting use cases. But talk about just a category that has not gotten the love from the capital markets. For sure. Next up, we have NPC Lass. A web through gaming platform, there is 21 million from Pintera, Marana, and others. Then we have BitLayer. This is a Bitcoin Layer 2 protocol that raised 11 million from Franklin Templeton. Then we have Etherfuse. They're an RWA tokenization platform. There is 3 million from White Star Capital, North Island Ventures, and others. Network 3 is a decentralized AI platform that raised 5 million from borderless and escape velocity.

Then you have Red Pill, a permissionless network for, large language models, they raise 5 million from Anamoka brands, DFG, and J-square. A sister is an AI agent protocol. They raised 1.7 from Web3 Ventures.com, Moonhill, and Katango. Then we have an acquisition. Galaxy Digital has acquired the assets of Crypto Manifactore, a blockchain node operator. And then we have another one. Riot Platforms has acquired block mining, which is a Bitcoin mining company for $92.5 million. Then you have a priori, a Monad Defi project. There is $8 million from Pantera, Consensus, laser digital, and CMS. And here's another Monad won Kuru, which is a Monad's Central

Limit order book. They raised $2 million from Electric, Brevin Howard, CMS, and Braid. Busy deal week. I guess the one that I didn't put in there was Fold. Did you see the Fold is going public via a reverse merger? Very interesting. Yeah, I didn't realize those were back on the cards. Yeah, let's go. So congrats to everyone in the deal front this week. All right, so you brought up Ethereum Spot ETFs.

They launched this week. So let's just take a look at the leaderboard here. This far side investors page is great. So it shows the flows coming in every day. And here's just the rundown of the top flow gatherers in the category so far. So BlackRock over the first three days has raised three. $354.8 million into their product. Bitwise is number two at $249.9 million fidelity and the number three spot at $180 million.

So, and then you look across and you have gray scale. So the outflows have been aggressive, similar to the Bitcoin ETF. They have outflowed $1.157 billion while raising and offsetting $19 million into their mini product. They're a grayscale mini-eath product, which has the lower fee. So all in all, total outflows actually across the board, since it's dragged down by grayscale. So in aggregate, there has been $179 million sold into this product. So what were your thoughts on the launch? Yeah, I mean, you kind of expect the outflows. It's the same dynamic that you saw with Bitcoin and the grayscale product there. But

In terms of the volumes, day one, pretty successful launch, I would say. You know, this new cohort of ETH ETFs is doing pretty sizable volumes relative to the Bitcoin ETFs, you know, when they launched. And, you know, good inflows into the new products and Bitwise, again, punching above their weight. So big congrats to Bitwise at the number two spot there. So, yeah, I would say plenty to be happy about actually from the Ethereum. side. So gray scale is obviously driving down these flows. So maybe just spending a minute talking about their fee strategy here. So you remember with the Bitcoin ETF, they had the high fee,

and that's why they had the outflows that were very, very aggressive. This time they've launched two products. So they have ETHE, which is the main product that already existed, the private fund. That has a 2.5% fee on it. You know, you compare that to Bitwise at 20 bibs, so 0.2%. It's obviously a they have launched that mini trust product so the gray scale mini product is a 0.15% fee so obviously hoping to have some offsetting inflows into that product and you know I guess they have had some very quality flows into that 119 million in aggregate but I think you just have this you know several week period here where eth-e-e has to come back to reality and that fee is not going to work for people that you know it's not going to work if you're in a tax advantage to count you can just flip over into the lower fee product

yeah um what what's your verdict on uh the first day of flows and volumes here i thought it was healthy um it was about what i expected obviously this comes in a week where there was some pretty strong economic data and so you did see the the over like the magnificent seven kind of sold off a little bit so it wasn't the the best week for just overall risk assets. So with that consideration, I actually thought it was a pretty strong launch. I mean, if you compare it to other ETF launches outside of Bitcoin, it was a spectacular launch. Yeah, that's right. The Bloomberg guys always make this point relative to most ETF launches. It was a blockbuster. We're just kind of desensitized to that because of the Bitcoin launch,

which was all time. Now, the other thing that happened this week was the Mount Cox distributions, have really start to heat up. And so it looks like BitStamp and Cracken have received the Monkawks distributions. And you haven't really seen Bitcoin sell off the way maybe some people thought it would. So it seems like the flow story on the Bitcoin side has actually been pretty strong this week. Yeah, it's rallying. In fact, I think it's all big today. Maybe the market was anticipating it a bit.

We saw that weakness in the price in the last couple weeks, but we seem to be weathering it pretty well here. So it's kind of one of those gray swans we'd been looking at for the better part of a decade now. And it seems like it's behind us. You know, we always say markets climb a wall of worry and look at what we have behind us already here. So we have FTX obviously off the table. And you have about what, $15 billion worth of cash coming back to FTC's creditors at some point over the next year. That's US dollars.

In dollar terms. In dollar terms. So some of that will go back into the crypto ecosystem. It's already been sold. So you have that. You have the German government punted out of their Bitcoin holdings. That was another big wall of worry. You have the regulatory environment seemingly getting a lot better here.

You know, you're starting to hear murmurings from some of the banks that think that they have a path to launching crypto custody. Sab 121 being, you know, reconsidered or at least some special exemptions offered for some of these large custody banks. it's kind of hard to see the next crisis, which I guess is always a dangerous thing to say, because that's when you don't expect it. Yeah. Now, there was a 24-hour period where people briefly thought that Kamala Harris might be, I guess now the Democratic nominee might be warming up to Bitcoin, but I think those rumors were all found.

And she's not speaking at the Bitcoin conference here, which I don't think made sense for her anyway. Frankly, I think she would have been booed. So no sign at all really that the top Democrats are changing their posture at all on crypto, even though there was about 24 hours of hopefulness around that. Yeah, I saw that there was David Bailey who tweeted that they had been in discussions with Harris' camp about coming to speak. And then they canceled. But I guess the question is, what would you do if you were Harris right now? And you, you know, would you come out publicly in support of, you know, this technology?

Are there any things that you would actually be thinking about relative to the digital asset ecosystem? I don't think it's a core campaign issue for her at all. And it seems like they're for now happy to let Trump own the crypto lobby and sort of the crypto voting block. I mean, you know, remember she was one of the more progressive members of the Senate when she was in there. and historically progressives are not very supportive of Bitcoin or the crypto industry, although there are a couple exceptions. And so ultimately, I think it seems like she's politically not aligned. And so I don't see why she would depart from that.

Their strategy to win votes doesn't seem to have anything to do with crypto, as far as I can tell. I'll take the other side of that. I don't really see a downside of being supportive of this technology. I don't think that you point out, and I think you're right, that this is not a core campaign issue. I don't think people in swing states are looking at what is your opinion on Bitcoin as the reason why they're going to punch a certain way on the ballot box. However, you know, there's 50 million Americans that have ever owned a crypto asset. And I don't think you'll find someone that would vote against you if you were in support of this. And so I think if Harris were to come out and, you know,

come out and say, look, we're going to change the posture of the SEC. We're going to become more supportive of our regulated financial institutions actually competing in this market. We're going to take certain steps to preserve self-custody. I don't think she'd lose any votes. And if anything, I think she would potentially stop the flow of capital from, you know, the fundraising side into the Republican side of it. So I think it would be sound politics for her to do something here, at least come out and say things will be different at the SEC. Yeah, I agree. I would just be surprised if they did that.

I don't know if she's ever said anything about crypto, actually. So they're in the, I'm sure, early stages of crafting their policy vision and seeing what you will see if it differs at all from Biden's. But look, she's further to the left than Biden in my. opinion. And so as for me, I'd be very, very surprised if there was a meaningful evolution on crypto from the Democratic side. Now, there was some movement on the political front here relative to a crypto bill. So this digital asset and money laundering bill that Elizabeth Warren had been co-sponsoring with Roger Marshall, who's a Republican out of Kansas, he quietly took his

name off of that bill on the 24th, so a couple days ago. That basically kills it as far as I'm concerned. So this is no longer something that is being put forth in a bipartisan way. It's just basically Elizabeth Warren's death to crypto bill. And to remind you, this is the bill that would make it functionally impossible to run a Bitcoin node in this country. You could not participate in staking. It would put brokerage requirements on anyone who is participating in open source public blockchains. So it's basically a let's kill crypto covertly bill. And it seems like this bill is is DOA. Yeah, that was nice to see.

I think it was Carson Smith that said something to the effect of you never really see people going from pro-crypto to anti-crypto, but you do see former opponents

evolving on crypto and becoming more favorable on it. It looks like that is an instance. It's pretty encouraging to see. Yeah, I was very happy to see that. In other news this week, let's talk about tokenization. We haven't talked about

in a while, but Hamilton Lane, it looks like they have tokenized their senior credit opportunities fund on the Solana blockchain in partnership with Libra, WebN Group, and Nomura's Laser Digital. So tokenization thing, we don't talk about it much on the podcast, but does seem to be gaining some momentum. Hamilton Lane is a massive asset manager. Yeah, the RWA sector is quietly growing and marching upwards. I think it's more of a countercyclical play, because if you have the choice between a, you know, crypto-native interest rate or a trad-fi interest rate when we're in a bull market, crypto rates are higher, which is the case now. And so I think you'll see RWA's take off actually as things cool off in crypto. So I do think it's countercyclical. But despite that,

the sector is just steadily growing. Yeah, I think this is the category where if you look at it, having a liquid secondary market on some of these things is only really possible if you have a market structure bill. So think about it maybe in the context of categories that get really interesting with some regulatory clarity. Another thing this week that was interesting, we have a couple of movements on the allocator side. So the municipal pension fund of Jersey City announced that they plan to invest in Bitcoin ETFs. So they plan to get some exposure there. And then just today I saw 13F filing from the of Michigan pension fund that they have already invested in Bitcoin ETFs via the ARC Bitcoin ETF, a total of $6.6 million into Bitcoin. So we're starting to see pension funds get in

the game here. It's remarkable. And then also on the allocator side, Marathon, of course, the Bitcoin miner, they bought $100 million with the Bitcoin. They hold 20,000 units. Very interesting because this is what happened last cycle, too. The miners, some miners saw themselves as levered exposure to Bitcoin and sought to hold on their balance sheets. And other miners just wanted to arbitrage electricity prices and the price of Bitcoin and just capture the spread and be more utilities focused. Marathon had sold, I believe, all their Bitcoin during the credit crunch of 22 and 23, as did most of the other miners.

and now they're scooping it back up again. So pass this prologue here. Do you think we'll see more publicly traded companies put Bitcoin on the balance sheet here? We haven't talked about that in a while. I just, I don't know. Like unless you really want to become a vehicle for Bitcoin, I think it just confuses things if you take your balance sheet and you put into an extremely volatile asset.

It just makes the analysis of that company much trickier. You know, we've seen it obviously from micro strategy at tremendous scale, similar scientific is another company that's done it. Now you have Marathon, which I guess makes sense, though, since they're already in the Bitcoin mining space. But I don't know. If you're a small microcap stock, it's kind of surprising you haven't seen more of these smaller companies do it, if nothing else,

just to see if they can get some, you know, by side attention. Yeah, you can definitely harvest a lot of PR and you can get a conference speaking slot if you do it. So, but I don't know. know as a sell side analyst covering one of these companies, I would be a little flummoxed if they did it. All right. Did you see this report from BVNK on stablecoins, the decade of digital dollars? I think we are in a golden age of well done reports on stable coins. Yeah, this one was excellent. We're going to put this one in the show notes.

Big props to BVNK for writing this. We also have one cooking. So hopefully that's out in the next month or so. And we are profiling stable coin adoption in emerging markets. Very excited to share that. It's kind of the first report of its kind of based on a quantitative survey. So our hope is that we will be adding to that corpus of already very good information about stable coins. Stable coins just so hot right now. It's just in the national interest to have stable coins be more and more functional to U.S. citizens.

Love stable coins. You know, I said something. the other day on Twitter, which was if everything in crypto didn't work and stable coins did work, we still would have achieved something. And a lot of people find that to be a boring or kind of unimaginative perspective, but I think it's true. You know, we lost cash. We kind of lost the ability to make private, somewhat autonomous transactions as finance became digitized. And stable coins are the first thing that gives cash like property. back to digital transactions.

So I know it doesn't sound very ambitious, but I really do believe that. If everything else in crypto fails and we just got stablecoins, I think we still would have achieved something very significant. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Also, stablecoins are just the facilitator for a lot of interesting things that people want to do with public blockchains. So the idea of having micro transactions that are dollar-denominated,

I think is very interesting. I think some of these highly scalable L1, blockchains like Monad will play a huge role in driving stable coin adoption on all sorts of new applications. It seems like it'll be an exciting next five years in this category. Yeah. And I mean, if you look at where crypto has found the most consumer adoption, it is stablecoins, just factually speaking. That is the killer app. Over 100 million addresses now hold a stable coin. Tens of millions of people use them on a weekly or monthly basis. We'll be sharing a lot more data about this soon. I think,

our report will really elucidate the conversation. So what's your take here on the prospects of getting a rate cut next week? Do you think that this is in the cards? We came in a little bit hot on some of the data this week. I don't know. My macro chops are not as sharp as they once were. But I think September could be on the cards for sure, if not August. it seems like the market has flipped very bullish if you just look at the talking heads,

the macro people that overlap into Bitcoin. The sentiment, I'd say, is probably stronger than it has been in the past six months or so. Yeah, I mean, it helps that we had a bit of a relief rally in the last couple of days here as well. So, yeah, we'll see a lot of musings around political pressures to have a rate cut ahead of the election. we'll see how independent the Fed is. But it is interesting to note that no one really believed in the notion of a soft landing a year ago. And it looks like we actually did have a soft landing in the U.S. at least. Yeah, I guess you have to give Powell a lot of credit, right?

I mean, kind of maybe sometimes is the most hated man in the capital markets, but it seems like he's so far navigated this very deftly. Yeah, I mean, hiking rates, 500 basis points. over a matter of months is a brave move. And aside from a couple bank insolvencies, it seems like nothing really broke. I mean, it's remarkable.

Well, I would argue the entire regional banking system broke, but it was really the bank term funding program that bailed it out. So SVB was sort of the, you know, they got killed, but the 10 others or the 100 others were saved. Yeah,

in the grand scheme, the fallout was pretty minimal. And also the mortgage market in the U.S. is much less sensitive to rates. So that also helped. And we have the strongest economic growth in the developed world. So things are okay here. A lot of other developed countries in recession. But yeah, I'll give Powell some credit right now.

Soft landing. All right. So I think that's it for the week. Kept it light on the politics front this week because I just don't know if I can do this every single Friday talking about politics. until the election. I guess we'll just wait until this. Well, you're right, actually, right?

You said Biden would be out within the week, right? Yeah, I was. Last week you said that. It was an accurate prediction. I was a skeptic, and you nailed that one. So he is out. For a moment, there are rumors that he was deceased. That was false.

He's still with us. And Kamala is the presumptive nominee. It seems like even the Obama's just endorsed her today, I think. So the race is on. Now we wait to see who she picks her VP. Yeah, the race is certainly on. I don't think it'll be a pro-crypto VP. I don't think that that's in the cards necessarily.

I think it's Pete Buttigieg, is my guess. Oh, is that who you think it is? Well, let's check the old betting markets and see what they say. It seems like Kelly is the presumptive favorite here out of Arizona. Kelly and Arizona. Yeah, and then Shapiro in Pennsylvania is also. So Kelly on election betting odds is 36%. Shapiro's 27%.

Roy Cooper out of North Carolina is 12.6%. That's interesting because he's a junior senator in Arizona. He beat Blake Masters in that last race. I think his credentials are that he was, oh, no, no, he's a second term senator. Yeah, he was an astronaut, right? Yeah, he was an astronaut. I don't know about that as a credential. I think that's a great credential.

You could say the same about being a real estate mogul or something. Is that a credential? But does an astronaut, does that prepare you for office? I think it does. I think having the perspective on the whole world, right? Like that's a. Oh, okay, because he saw the globe. It's like the whole Earth catalog, right?

You know, he saw the globe. He has a more multifaceted view of our world. Okay. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, he saw it from outside, so he gets it with one world, you know, one species. I also think there's a proof of work associated with being an astronaut. Don't you have to train for like 20 years to get to that level? I mean, you have to probably be a fire jet pilot.

You have to go through just rigorous, you know, the amount of work that it actually takes to get there is just staggering. Yeah, you have to be elite in a couple different dimensions. You have to be top 0.01% in a couple of fields, I think, to be an astronaut. I'll give them credit for that. You know, so I think it's professional athletes and astronauts. Really, that's kind of who you're looking for, right? Well, do we have a history of professional athletes in higher office? I'm trying to think now.

Well, Steve Garvey, Steve Garvey, Arnold was a professional. Ford Senegger. Yeah, Garvey's probably going to lose, it looks like. Yeah, I'm trying to think any others. I would have said Tom Brady would have been a great candidate, but I just don't know anymore. George Wea was a great soccer player back in the day. He became president of Liberia on that basis. Okay.

So it can qualify you for. And then interestingly, his son, Tim Wea, then when played for the U.S. national team, which I thought was like, dude, your dad was the president of Liberia, and you're obviously. opting and play for the U.S. national team? Come on. Oh, that's interesting. It's like Joelle Ambide. He's from Cameroon. He's now a U.S. citizen.

He's playing on the U.S. men's national basketball team. So actually, the Olympics are starting, what, today, tomorrow this week? Yeah, Friday, the 26th here. So as we record, I think they start tonight. And there was just a big sabotage on the trains in Paris. I don't know if you saw that. I was against my will listening to NPR this morning. and they kept on saying saboteurs.

They said saboteurs had taken down the French train system. They said saboteurs like 15 times. And I don't know why I found that incredibly amusing. Well, because there was multiple. That's the plural, right? So I think there were multiple attacks, it looks like. But why were the, why? What was the, have they announced any of their goals or objectives, the saboteurs?

No, I don't think so. Why did they take down the French train system? I don't know. It looks like it was arched. arson attacks here. Not great. So hopefully that's... You know, I'm disinclined to really give the euros or the French credit for anything,

but I will say they have a great rail system that we would be very well placed to deploy something like that in the U.S. Yeah, I looked into this a little bit. And it seems like their concept of eminent domain over there is a little bit different from ours. I think it's easier to get people out of houses if you just want to run a railroad track. through a town type of thing. And I think our concept of owning land is quite different.

So maybe that's part of the reason. Yeah, I suppose you can build big infrastructure projects if you have less of a regard for property rights. It's the same actually with high voltage transmission here. So China has tons of it and we have very little. Their grid is much more united. Ours is much more disparate. And the big problem is property rights.

Yeah, so I guess you- Hoist by our own partard. You take the good with the bad. This is actually the Olympics that Boston was initially bidding on and didn't go through and didn't win. But can you imagine having the Olympics in Boston with the traffic as bad as it is here? That would just be a disaster.

Oh, no. No, not equipped for that. I would have to move out for a month. It would have been awful. So what events are you going to spectate? What are you looking forward to? I like the marathon. I like the 10K.

I like all the track and field. I'll watch the basketball. What else? I'll probably watch the rowing. Yeah, I like the athletics, the sprinting. I'll definitely tune in for that. There's all kinds of weird stuff that's like, I don't know, is they like break dancing or skateboarding or something?

Yeah, it's like the X games. I think the Olympics are trying to innovate and stay current with the youths. And they keep adding weird new. I actually know someone or met someone on the commission. I told them to incorporate paddle into the Olympics. I thought that would be a great sport. Paddle or pickleball? Pickleball.

Paddle is a better spectator sport than pickleball. Pickleball is dreadfully boring to watch. I don't know why they wouldn't have it, but don't they have table tennis? Table tennis is kind of interesting. Pickle ball just as much as fun as to play. it's horrible to watch because you just end up dinking and it's just very tedious. Yeah.

But paddle. Paddle is a great spectator sport, my opinion. All right. So we'll be tuning into the Olympics. I think that's it for the week. Very eventful week for you. So congrats again. Hope you enjoy the conference down in Nashville.

What's on top today? Is it just all speeches and panels? Today, yeah, I will go to the conference. You know, I'm also going to eat some barbecue. The notion of being able to eat again is very nice. Early this week, I weighed in at 163 pounds. And when I started the camp, I was 180 for context. And right now I'm 170, by the way.

I've rehydrated seven pounds in 24 hours. Wow. Wow. But I will tell you, losing five, six pounds. of water is a terrible thing. I don't recommend anyone does it. It sucks. And I would have, I would dream about food. On the plane over here to Nashville, I had a dream about donuts. Oh my gosh. That was that. So I can't tell you how excited I am to finally eat again. And I'm in a great food city. So I'm going to be feasting. All right. So we'll get this podcast out and then go

enjoy some time with some Bitcoiners down in Nashville. Hopefully you get some good announcements over the next couple days and we'll cover them next week. Yeah, stay tuned. All right, everyone, have a safe and healthy weekend and we will see you on Monday.