On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 10/09/26 (Going Bunker Mode, classical ECC breaks, AI's math discoveries) (EP.744)

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

Matt and Nic are back with more deals and news. In this episode:  Is it appropriate to have AI manage your fantasy league? Quant firms are hiring "quals" Justin Drake scares everyone in crypto Did AI destroy math? Why a classical ECDSA break would be worse than a quantum one Why we lean forward hash-based signatures for post-quantum Why rotating your address doesn't help now Is Bitcoin the "least of our concerns" if ECC breaks? Nic makes a new scientific discovery with Astra The NFL thinks that gambling should be state regulated What's driving interest in Pokemon cards? Content mentioned in our episode: Coin Metrics, The Death and Life of the Average Memecoin  

Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only is an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

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

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And the AI people are really mad at you. I guess the anti-AI people are really mad at you. Something about, are you automating your fantasy football league? Yeah.

People are coming out of the woodwork and saying, how is Nick actually automating his fantasy football? They really didn't like that. They didn't like that. To be clear, all of my co-league mates are aware of this. I told them from the start. That's what I was going to do. Because I'm not, as you know, from listening to me talk on this podcast,

I don't know anything about football. I don't have time to like check waivers and like keep track of hundreds of different guys. I can barely remember the name of my own team starting quarterback. Well, it's Drake May. You just told me, right? Yeah, it's Drake May. So both of my leagues are automated, fully automated, by the way. I don't have to do anything ever. The AI handles everything.

I think people don't know how good AI is now. Do you screenshot or do you have some sort of a more elaborate integration? I have codex with standing instructions to periodically open browser instances. of the leagues and then click round because they don't really have API access but so Codex just opens the browser so there's no it's much more automated than just taking screenshots and yeah people are like

well why would you automate your hobby that's against the point of the hobby it's not my hobby I don't like playing fantasy you just do it out of you feel like you need to it's a social obligation yeah so I think everybody wins you know I get more into it because now I have a semi-functioning team

thanks to AI. I don't have to worry about if someone broke his rib or has a spray and toenail or whatever. And I can spend all my time doing banter with the rest of the league. All right. I don't hate it. I will say I think I'm outperforming you doing it conventionally. So I'm not convinced that the AI can do a better job than a human at this task. As of right now, the results are dismal, I would say.

So I think across my two leagues, my collective record is one and seven. That would support the idea of not. doing this. It's not a strong start, but I think over time, the AI advantage will compound as we get into the season. And I think I'm going to make the playoffs in both leagues. Do you know the name Bill James at all? No. So Bill James was this guy in the 70s and 80s that was pretty dialed into just data for baseball. And he wrote these big books that I used to get as a kid just with baseball stats and interesting tidbits. And eventually he got hired by the Boston Red Sox. And this was pre-Moneyball as moneyball started to become a thing. So I wonder if AI is going to have a big impact on just the

front office and how people put together teams for these leagues. I think so. I think it'll become much more quantitative. Although, have you heard that the quant firms are now hiring quals, qualitatives? I have not heard that. So people used to say, this is my quant. The new thing is actually, this is my qual. Oh, he can look you in the eyes and he can actually shake your hand and have a conversation. Now the math part's easy, right? What they want is ideas guys. So it's like the golden age of ideas guys. Now they're hiring guys that are just like charismatic and can think a little bit. Man, I feel like this is, this is great if you're just, you know, coming from a college athlete background, just get into sales, right? Yeah, that's the only thing left to do. This was a,

crazy week at the intersection of AI and crypto. We have a lot to talk about. Just Justin Drake. Actually, Yehuda Lindell from Coinbase had a really good thread too. Before we do, a couple of quick things. Castle Island content, I sat down with Esther Wong, the co-founder of Cashy, talking about the stable coin landscape. Then we had a bunch of deals this week. We did. So first up in the SIV portfolio, NOAA, a stable coin payments infrastructure company, there was $16 million from end-date capital, FG Labs, local globe, and others. So congrats to Shaw and the rest of the team there at NOAA. Then it's new research in open source AI lab.

They raised $90 million from robot ventures, Nvidia, and Union Square Ventures. Spico is a tokenized money market fund. They raise $90 million from NEA, index ventures, and others. Catalyst is an agenetic trading platform that raised $30 million from Sequoia, Coinbase Ventures, and Jump. Meanwhile, as a Bitcoin-denominated life insurance provider, there is $37.5 million from Bain, Capital Crypto, Han Ventures, and Framework Ventures.

Then it's Navra, which is a blockchain access platform. It's founded by Mike Kagni, a figure. There raised $19 million from Ribbit, Jump, and Figure. Hyperlink is a hyperliquid-based brokerage platform. There is 2.5 million from Alliance, North Island, and Reverie. Anvil is a DeFi protocol that raised $5 million in a token sale to Founders Fund, Pantara, and Bullish. as a B2B payments platform they were required by Anchorage.

So do you want to start by talking about math? Yeah, I think we have to because I didn't know what it is the mathematicians did before yesterday. Did you know? I think they solve math problems and they teach math classes and write math papers. So that's what I thought too. And so you'd think, well, mathematicians were probably pretty happy if someone came along and solved 100 major math problems all at once. Then what are you going to do all day, though?

They were very upset about this. So opening I, of course, announced solutions to 100 major math problems or so, published the results and just kind of left the world to digest it. The mathematicians hated this. Well, because what are you going to solve now? Well, I think there's probably more new questions, right? There's no, like, shortage of questions, don't you think? It's true.

But yeah, you know that they're not going to solve them. Our AI is going to get there first. So it is, I suppose it's a little disorienting if you're a mathematician and you've been thinking about this thing for 40 years and then some AI model comes around one day and just plongs down the answer on your desk, doesn't elaborate and leaves. And now your life's work is in tatters. Then what? Do you become an AI prompter, a prompt engineer?

I suppose that's what you do. I guess you can come up with new ideas. new puzzles for the AI to solve. But I also wonder just how difficult it is to actually understand the proofs. That seems to be the problem is that the proofs are written in kind of convoluted machinies, that they need mathematicians to translate it and understand it. So what I didn't realize is that mathematicians kind of considered math to be not really a problem-oriented domain.

like it seems that they're much more interested in the process almost than the output. Yeah. It's kind of like if we considered venture capital to be like an artisanal space, like a carpentry or something, and we were much more interested in enjoying the journey than generating DPI. Yeah. Some people seem to be of that mindset in our industry. So I kind of get that analogy.

Yeah, that is true. And so what I didn't realize is I thought mathematicians would just be over the moon if their field jumped for decades in a matter of weeks. I mean, I think a lot of this comes back to, is it replicable? Can you actually even understand these proofs enough to feel comfortable that they're solved? Or is this just introducing a new riddle that you have to go solve for the proof and you just don't understand it? Maybe there is there some brute forcing element to this too that is potentially just completely unreplicable? by a human brain. I think if you are a junior mathematician, you should be very excited.

That's my view. Because the frontiers have opened up and now each of these solve problems introduces many more sub-problems and so on. If you're a senior mathematician, you've spent your name studying the Ojpodge conjecture. Maybe your career's in tatters and you don't want to learn how to use AI. But it's funny, there's like the guild of human. human mathematicians has written some letter in protest, which I think is very quaint. I mean, what are you going to protest? It's like protesting at the automobile.

I think it's indicative of where the world is going. All these guilds are going to form ranks and resist the onslaught of AI, and the government's going to ratify it, I think, and force us to have a human in the loop for everything major. So along those lines, um, a theory. I don't know what you'd want to call him, Justin Drake. He had a tweet storm here that just went super viral talking about, it starts. I'll just read the first couple sentences. Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for, quote, bunker mode. My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to

fresh addresses, IE addresses, whose pub keys remain hidden behind a hash. And he goes on to say that it's basically not just quantum that he's worried about. He's worried about Frontier AI breaking ECDSA. What did you make of this? Yeah, I mean, Justin Drake was one of the co-authors on the Google paper on quantum earlier. So he's very deeply involved in the sort of quantum preparedness space and has helped orient Ethereum towards being quantum prepared, which is great.

So I generally aligned with him on these views and I'm grateful for his work. I also agree with him that post-op-A-I obliterating the field of math, we now have to worry about classical breaks to ECDSA, not just quantum breaks. And I think classical breaks would be much worse because they're unpredictable. Whereas at least with quantum, you can kind of see, okay, well, IBM built a 10 logical cubic computer, and Google built 100 one, and Microsoft built one with 500 lot.

you can kind of see the gradual pathway to building a scaled quantum computer, and then you know when we're at the moment of risk, which is not here yet. With a classical break, it could just be tomorrow. And it's not inconceivable to me, actually, that opening eye could find a solution to the discrete log problem that is conceivable. I can conceive of that. And that might just be an abrupt thing. That would be terrible, if so.

I think it's also worth pointing out that there are some very prominent people on the other side of this argument. And so I think this Justin Drake, you know, Post got just a ton of attention. And obviously it's a pretty scary message. Yehuda Lindell, who's one of the foremost cryptographers in the entire planet, he's over at Coinbase now as the head of cryptography. He had a tweet storm basically saying this was a bad take and that there's no evidence whatsoever pointing to break of decades old hardness assumptions. like elliptic curve cryptography. So I wouldn't take this as gospel, but clean hygiene on chain probably,

it's hard to argue that that is a good idea. I think cryptography was notable in its omission from the list of the hundreds of problems that opening I released. I do too. Scott Aronson, who's my guru on this stuff, pointed this out. So there are 376 papers that opening I released

and there was nothing on cryptography. he said in the blog post, my sources tell me that AI companies have now started gingerly and discreetly investigating whether their latest internal models can break important cryptographic protocols and primitives. So I think they probably found something. Who knows? I think that my practical takeaway from all this is actually that I'm more in favor of hash based signatures for post-quantum than Latin.

Yeah, because the attack vector of conventionally breaking a hash-based signature versus the lattice, the tradeoffs are better, right? Well, yeah, lattices are more efficient, and they kind of were the dominant post-quantum signature paradigm. But they are a bit like elliptic curves and that we kind of just trust that they're safe, but we don't know for sure. Whereas hashes were much more certain that you can't reverse-engineer hash. no matter how clever your algorithm is. I mean, because you think about it, if you take the Bible's worth of text and you hash it down into 50 characters,

no matter how good your algorithm is, you're never getting the original text out of that. Right. So the problem is the hash-based signatures are really clunky and big. Yeah, it calls into question what the performance of these blockchains, what that's going to look like in a post-quantum future.

There's one thing about the Justin Drake post that I totally disagree with, by the way. And what's that? Which is his entire call to action. On key rotation? Yeah. So there's no point to doing it, truthfully. Yeah, because if they, I mean, the price of these assets, if their compromise, is going

to plummet. So what does it even matter? Yeah. So there's no micro security without macro security. If one Bitcoin is stolen quantumly or through some ECC break, the Bitcoin will have a price of zero. So it doesn't matter that you have 100 Bitcoin in your wallet that are safe. There's still worth zero.

Yeah, right. So there's really no, I mean, there might be a need to panic, but there's no need to panic and rotate your coins because it doesn't matter if they are safe. All of the coins have to be safe. This is where you also get into is the sub-80Q take on this actually right, which is, okay, well, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of New York, Mellon, and all these other firms are going to be vulnerable on a million dimensions. mentions the whole financial plumbing goes away at some point if this is true so bitcoin is the

least of our concerns but i don't agree with that at all i mean i think bitcoin is the most of our concerns first of all because i care more about bitcoin than some bank you know being secure and secondly because it's easier to upgrade almost literally every other system as opposed to bitcoin yeah i i think there's a game theory element to crypto it also just makes it though the ripest place to be building right now because it's at the frontier of all these attacks. So I think some of the founders that pop out of the cybersecurity category here are just going to be world class and being able to extend what they're building into non-blockchain use cases. Yeah, the one thing that I want to say is that Bitcoin is often say, well, the internet is going

to be screwed as well. But the internet is already half post-quantum. Browsers are, right? Yeah, so this, probably this very connection that we're utilizing right now is post-quantum. TLS certificates are post-quantum. Most traffic going through Cloudflare is post-quantum. The one layer that's not as certificate authorities, those are still mostly RSA. So those have to arduously rotate. But I don't like it because it kind of implies, oh, well, nobody else has even begun rotating.

No, people have begun. Okay. so we in crypto land can't afford to take a very less a fair attitude to this. The internet is moving to new cryptography, so we should too. I suspect we'll be talking a lot more about this in the coming weeks. I do agree that it's just, it's very interesting that Open AI didn't put out anything having to do with cryptography, which leads me to believe they are either censoring themselves or the government is actually involved in some capacity here.

Maybe it's both. And I think it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if they said, hey, we're actually sitting on a discrete log solution. We're obviously not going to release it. We're going to responsibly disclose, and please go ahead and upgrade your stuff. Right. The only trouble would be if someone could use that same frontier model

to get the same answer. Yeah, I mean, that's where it becomes an issue. And could you have a fast catch-up here on some of these open-weight models, things like that? That's worthy of consideration. I think it would, what do you think that would do to the IPO of OpenAI if they were just coming out and saying, look, we're sitting on a bunch of solved mysteries over here. I think that's part of the appeal. I mean, apparently they said the average time to solve one of these 376 problems was three hours.

Yeah. So it wasn't like the Navier-Stokes thing where they had a swarm of 10,000 agents working for days. So these are, I actually asked my codex instance last night to solve. a major unsolved problem in science. Did it work? No, because I needed a laboratory to check whether its answer was right. So it came up with some theorem around bees and forest fires and the way bees perceive flowers and the presence of smoke.

Okay. And so it did all this thinking and it came up with its answer. and I was like, okay, well, how do I know if it's true or not? It's like, well, first you need an apiary and then you need all these sophisticated optics measurement devices. What was the question that you're trying to solve? It was something about how bees see ultraviolet light in the presence of forest fires and they see flowers.

I don't know. I just said it could solve any problem. That is the problem that settled on. And so I couldn't check the answer because I don't have a bee. test it and smoke and flowers and microscopes and stuff. Well, we have a long weekend coming up, so maybe you can make a talk to that. I believe I'm sitting on a new finding in science.

That's crazy. I have no way to prove it really to anyone. Be nice if it could come up with some, like, answers to unsolved mysteries. You know, JFK assassination, why did Malcolm Butler not play in the Super Bowl? Things like that. The next thing I said was, can you solve a mystery that I can prove? this is a real solved mystery. Yeah.

And it hasn't figured that one out yet. But I'm optimistic. Yeah. A bunch of other stuff happened this week. So we have agency rulemaking, which I think we're just going to be talking about this every single week. But CFTC, they began seeking public comments on two potential new frameworks, regulation CTX, which would allow retail traders to access leverage in margin crypto trading. In regulation CAM, which stands for crypto asset market.

that would create a new pathway to becoming a CFTC registered exchange instead of going state by state. These are very long rules. And there's going to be a lot of comments. There's a lot of edge cases here. So we'll see how this ends up. I am generally very optimistic and excited about this. I just think there's a lot of devil in the detail. And I guess there's two years to get these rules firmly rolled out.

Yeah, I think from a price and catalyst perspective, the rulemaking is actually more exciting than had clarity just passed. Because now we have two years of surprises every week from the SEC and CFDC. Yeah. And I think it's happening faster than it would have with the legislation, because now you don't have to rely on the legislation to put the guardrails in place. The agencies are just putting forth these rules. There has to be a lot of other stuff coming from the SEC as well.

I mean, they had the custody rule as it relates to RIAs two weeks ago, last week, Maybe we still need one of those for broker-dealers. I think there's just a laundry list of things that I expect to get checked off here, which I think is most relevant if you're a regulated financial institution that wants to do more in the space, which historically they've been blocked from doing things. So this is all very positive. If you worked at a bank or broker-dealer, you ought to be paying a lot of attention right now. On the prediction market front, kind of a setback for the major prediction markets,

39 states on both sides. The aisle filed a brief, Emka's brief with Supreme Court. I think the deadline is today to let the states regulate prediction markets as gambling. The NFL filed a brief saying they think sports contracts are gambling and should be regulated by the states. They were joined in that by the Seminole tribe of Florida as well,

which if you don't know how gambling works in Florida, the Seminoles actually run the whole show. Which is very interesting. They kind of, you have to have a deal with them to operate a casino down there. Yeah. And so there's the hard rock. So there's one sports betting app in Florida is the hard rock app. And it doesn't even work.

So I can't bet on sports, which is probably for the best. I would probably lose money if I did that. I mean, that can't be good for these prediction markets to have the NFL. I mean, this is 90% of the volume on these prediction markets right now in the U.S. is sports betting. The NFL and the Seminoles and 39. states. Yeah. That's a big coalition. Spans all kinds of different groups. So my guess is that this thing just gets pushed back to the states and you just end up with this balkanized regulatory landscape around

betting again. And the PMs are going to have to find something else to bet on, you know? I mean, politics. Maybe they just locate themselves in New Jersey instead of New York or something, right? And you have to VP on in if you're in one of the states. I think you have to fist. I have to, I think you have to physically be there, right? Aren't you? I think going in through a VPN is not allowed. Well, there's the midterms coming up, so I guess people think that will catalyze a lot of non-sports volume.

It usually does, right? But I don't know. Are there... I don't know if there's that much the better... I feel like it's just going to be a blue wave. Right. I don't... And are there close races even?

I mean, not marquee ones. Sherrod Brown. Yeah, I don't even know how close that is, though. he might be coming back. So that might be a tough one for the prediction markets. FinCEN withdrew two proposed rules this week that would have expanded reporting requirements to cryptocurrency users. There's the 2020 unhosted wallet rule, which required exchanges to collect counterparty

information on self-custody transactions above 3,000. So this would have meant if you're pulling money off of like a Coinbase in excess of $3,000, you need to disclose and docks your. wallet, even if it's a hardware wallet. And so that's gone. And then the 2023 proposal designated, designating foreign-linked crypto-mixing as a primary money laundering concern. I was a little surprised at that, but I think there are some strong arguments around privacy on why you'd want to use one of those things. What did you make of these withdrawals? I don't know if I agree with the foreign-linked mixing not being a money laundering concern.

Yeah. I might take to the side of that one. The unhosted wallet rule gave us problems for years and years. It's incredible that it's gone. Oh, it's great. I mean, I think it actually, that put a lot of people in physical harm, physical danger. Right. Like doxing.

It's almost like having to publicly disclose, hey, I have two bars of gold underneath my mattress. What did you make of the New York Times' profile of CZ? Did you read it? I skimmed it. Seems like he's living his best life right now, huh? So he has disputed the Forbes 114 billion net worth estimate. Unsurprisingly, Forbes was erroneous.

He says it's only 10 to 30 billion. Oh. He doesn't, I guess he's not really involved at all. He seems to be running, like cultivating relationships with various governments. I think there's probably a narrative arc here where Binance U.S. comes back. and maybe he is involved. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that. Two Ethereum Layer 2s announced this week they're going to shut down,

including Blass, which was a very major project for all. I think they'd over $2 billion in TEL, citing low usage in unsustainable economics. Yeah, interesting. I think there's going to be a little bit of a culling of the herd of these Ethel 2s here. So not shocking to see. I was interested in this one, X stocks, which is the largest tokenized stocks ecosystem, they announced that they are

launching natively on Monad and immediately launching with a thousand tokenized equities that are tradable on chain. I think this is going to be more of a theme for the next 12 months here. It's just tokenized real world assets coming on chain, native integrations, probably a sign of things to come. This was announced at token 2049, which you and I are not out this year. We didn't go. But I agree. I think the supply of tokenized stocks has like 100xed in the last six months or something. Yeah.

Even without proper rulemaking, which I think just shows you like there's a ton of appetite here. The crypto people yearn for conventional equities in a tokenized format. Well, just think about the things you can do with them, cash flowing assets, immobilizing them, being able to borrow against them natively on chain. there's a lot of appetite for that. Yeah, I think so. I mean, we still haven't really answered the question of how should one tokenize an equity properly? I think that's a question that the SEC, we need them to opine on that.

That one in particular, yeah. I mean, what you don't want to have is five versions of Tesla trading differently in different legal jurisdictions, different tax treatments, different fee structures. it's that's not going to work you're just going to end up some of these aren't even tokenized equities they're swaps yeah with no ownership interest whatsoever and some of them are just tokenized economic interests and some sketchy spivv i don't really like either of those approaches to be honest quite a few of them are just derivative instruments with no underlying claim no ability to get dividends so we have to have a cohesive framework, but right now it's very, very clear that there's a ton of appetite from retail on this.

And I think there's also just a desire for a lot of these big asset management firms to reduce fees and drive better economics to their end customers. And blockchain settlement rails probably is a big part of that story. Samsung has said they're going to add USDC to Samsung wallet in partnership with Coinbase in Bastion. So that's letting US Galaxy users send stable coins to other wallets. in 60 countries without needing to install a separate app. Samsung's been so aggressive in the space. I've never really used a Samsung software product, have you?

TV, maybe. And washing machine, I think. Okay. You put a USDC wallet on that? Yeah, there might be something there, actually. I guess Samsung must have a lot of other businesses outside the U.S. that are more financial services oriented. I hated the Samsung TV.

actually oh really it the software they have you noticed this the software that comes bundled with tvs is just the worst buggyest nonsense you've ever used so well usually you have to just throw a roku or an apple tv on top of it that's the only way to do it yeah yeah because they're constantly trying to update themselves they're spying on you yes they're spyware sometimes they even record the screen or even record the microphone i mean it's actually a nightmare yeah Yeah, Palmer Lucky's tweeted about this a bunch of times, enough to scare me. A couple odds and ends here. The Defy Education Fund, I thought they had a really good piece this week going into detail

around threads about AI safety. Basically, does building software make you legally responsible for how other people use it? There's some parallels there, obviously, in the AI space versus what we've been dealing with in crypto. So we'll put that in our newsletter. And then I enjoyed the state of the network piece from Coin Metrics, Talos, guys. this week on the death in the life of an average meme coin, which I guess is kind of intuitive. Like these things launch, they start hot, and then they die over, I don't know, two months,

three months on average. Yeah, they said in the piece the median meme coin reaches its all-time high, 17.2 days after being frustrated. And they collapse a median 370 days from that peak to death, minus 95%. Only 3% of the mean coins that they covered ever regain their all-time home. So it's not looking good for the meme coins. Yeah, I guess that's not shocking. But what are the most successful ones ever?

I guess Doge, right, that had quite a run for a while? They have a chart where they looked at the Salana meme coin era, which is not the whole, I mean, I guess Doge is from an earlier era. But just in the Salonome Coin era, the single most successful one was called Pepe. Yeah. So it's worth It's over a thousand days into its existence And it's worth a 1.8 billion

Pengu and Pump are other notables But yeah there's really not a lot of them That are above the water line here Do you remember when people were raising money for meme coin funds That was quite a time to live in I do I think the equivalent today is people buying Pokemon cards

Oh my gosh I cannot get over. I was talking to someone about that this week, and I've barely been following this, but you know those grading services where you can send baseball cards in to be graded on like a 1 to 10 scale? Yeah.

So those are backed up. You can't get anything graded right now, apparently, because it's all of these Pokemon cards that actually have physical delivery on some of these websites, that they're in line first to get graded. And so they're grading these worthless cards, and it costs like $80, I think, to grade them.

but the backlog in the, like, baseball and basketball trading card space is purely a result of Pokemon, apparently. Why are Pokemon cards popular right now? Because I think some of these pack ripping sites, you can opt to take physical delivery, and Pokemon's are... Why more broadly is the asset class? Like, why now? I thought like we had another CARES Act and PPP. Like, as far as I know, rates are pretty high. So money is not that cheap.

So why did it take off? It's a great question. I don't know. It just feels like we're in one of those, like, every 10-year cycles with some very strange asset class goes haywire. Okay, we just need to figure out what the next one is. Yeah. And hopefully it has something to do with our domain.

If it is rare orchids, then I, will do extremely well. So I'm selfishly hoping it's a botanical craze. Oh, interesting. Okay. If it's like 1989 to 1992 tops and Don Russ baseball cards,

I might have to retire. See, because it could be. Like, we just don't know what asset class it will be. What about Pogs? Do you think Pogs make a comeback? I didn't hold on to any mind. I've never had that. Was that a 1990s thing?

Yeah, it was like early 90s. You'd bring just a sleeve of pogs to school, and then you'd just play pox. What was pogs? So you would, it was, you would stack up these almost like milk top little things, little pieces of cardboard, and then you'd have a slamer piece, which is a heavier instrument, and you'd slam them on top of these cardboard pieces and try to turn them over. This sounds like a victor. era toy or something.

Yeah, I mean, we didn't have computers and we didn't have cell phones. So what else was there to do? It's amazing how people amused themselves before iPads. Yeah. Had to have an active imagination. There are people. You could go to stores and buy pogs back then. It was crazy time.

I think my equivalent when I was young was crazy bones. Did you have this? No, I don't even know what that is. The thing, this slight evolution of the concept. Well, the big thing now for kids is, these squishy toys. But do you do anything with them or it's just collectible? You squish them.

They're like little like stuffed animal looking things. You know, I think it actually could be be beanie babies if they play their cards right. They could have to come back. There's a strong nostalgic aspect with Pokemon cards, right? Definitely. And then tie, is it tie the company that makes beanie babies?

Maybe some private equity firm can take them over and then just stop production. and so now they just will magically accrue value through scarcity. I can see that. I think this pack ripping phase, craze, is what's driving a lot of this. Do you know how this works? I really, I have no idea. All right.

So apparently what happens is, and I'm just going to use arbitrary numbers because I actually have never done it before. But you go on and you have credits or dollars or whatever, but kids have access to it. So it must be some sort of a scheme, almost like video game. points or something. But you go on, you buy, say, $10 worth of a Pokemon card. You immediately, they rip the pack for you and you see what you have. And then you have the option to just sell it back. And so, again, using arbitrary numbers, but all right, they rip it up and you get 30 cents on the

dollar, but immediately. And so maybe then you'll go, so it's gambling for kids. So it's like a scratch off. It's a scratch ticket. But it's just with more collateral and more hologramed. Yeah, and if you get the rare Pokemon card, you can actually get it mailed to you, which is where the grading comes in. And then what? Then you just have it? I think this is, yeah, this is just a way to get kids hooked on gambling from where I said. Okay, so it seems very corrosive. In China, I'm told that they have this with rocks. Rocks, so you go to like a quarry and you pick a rock and then they cut it in half with a bandsaw.

And if there's jade in it, you hit the jackpot, the rock jackpot. The Rock Jackpot. Wow. I believe that this is a thing I haven't been. Similar concept. Yeah, and people say that crypto is for pure degenerates. Come on. I think the whole world has become like crypto in a really bad way.

Like in a very negative way socially. And as you say, it's not like it's a zero interest rate environment. It's just the gambling culture has permeated into everything. I think rates need to go to 10%. I don't think they will before the mid-trust. So that's for sure. Well, you know what? This is a good opportunity for our listeners.

What's the email again? Info at castle island. Dot v.c. If you know what is behind the craze, let us know. Well, we'll leave it there. Good luck with your fantasy automated situation this weekend. I hope that Drake makes the roof for you. Yeah, he will.

I'm banking on him. All right, everyone, have a safe and healthy weekend, and we will see you on Monday.