On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 10/11/24 (HBO Satoshi Unveil, SEC v Cumberland, World Liberty Fi tokensale) (EP.567)

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode: Are shipping regulations making the oceans hotter? Is Satoshi Peter Todd? Is the identity of Satoshi the best mystery of all time? The SEC comes after Cumberland Crypto.com sues the SEC World Liberty Financial is doing a tokensale Uniswap announces Unichain Is Polymarket manipulated? Ryan Salame appears on Tucker Sponsor notes: Coin Metrics, State of the Network's Q3 2024 Mining Data Special: In Coin Metrics' State of the Network issue 280, we provide our quarterly update on Bitcoin mining. Withum's Digital Currency and Blockchain Technology Team specializes in crypto-assets, offering accounting, tax and advisory solutions to fortify trust in a dynamic industry. Contact them today to get started. - withum.com/crypto

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.

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Welcome to Ron the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode's brought to you by Witham. So if you listen to the show, you know that we take tax accounting and auditing very seriously. And when it comes to digital assets, you need to build trust in relationships with your counterparties like custodians, brokerages, and even the regulators. And that's where Witham comes in. There are top 25 accounting, tax, and advisory firm. And they have a team of professionals that is dedicated to the digital asset and blockchain technology industry. They help out some of the highest profile companies in our industry with things like tax advisory, accounting for token sales, stable coin audits, financial statement audits, and much, much more. They're not just enthusiasts. They're

they're not just accountants, rather, they're crypto enthusiasts. And they were the first accounting firm to start out a digital asset practice. So head over to witham.com slash crypto to learn more. Tax day is coming up. Tax day is coming up. We actually have a tax episode coming out next week. Thrilling. Yes. So that's October 15, I think. Well, there have been some extensions, maybe because of the hurricane, something like that. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Looks like the hurricane, you know, luckily it wasn't a category five when it hit down there. So I was glad that it wasn't as devastating as it looked, although tons of damage with those tornadoes. Yeah, it somehow turned into a category two when I made landfall.

We didn't get anything in Miami. Everybody was all afraid. Nothing happened here. Didn't even rain there? We have worse storms on a weekly basis. Like Miami Beach regularly floods. Nothing happened yesterday. I'm glad that it wasn't about a bad.

one because I was looking pretty fierce. Wasn't it like the biggest storm in the history of storms at one point when it was out over the Gulf of Mexico? Well, certain parts of Florida did have what I don't know, they call it like a thousand year storm, something like that in terms of rainfall. So there were parts of Florida up to the north that got a ton of rain. So we'll see what the damage is. You know what an interesting thing is I heard about why storms are strengthening. lately is. I don't know what you're going to say next, but humor me.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's obviously God's punishment for our sins. But beyond that, it's also, there's this theory that, due to emission standards, we stopped, we made big ships stop emitting sulfur. Yeah, I saw Paul Merlucky Evangelo was tweeting about this.

So this has been a topic in, I guess, like dissident quarters of Twitter for a while, which is that sulfur emissions from these ships were actually increasing the albedo of the oceans as in making them cooler by making them more reflective somehow. Look, okay, I don't understand the science, okay? Don't ask me about the science, but something about the sulfur,

there were all these warnings when we put those standards into place that it would cause the oceans to be hotter. This is a weird unintended consequence of the sulfur thing. And so we told the ships they had to stop emitting sulfur. Now the oceans are hotter. And now just on a gross basis, the Earth is hotter as well. And the storms are stronger because hotter oceans equals stronger storms. Well, I did see some people tweeting about that.

I just made a decision earlier in the week that I was not going to be a part of weather or Twitter this week. I just, I can't be a part of that. Yeah. The climate discourse is controversial enough. I think we have enough on our hands for one show in terms of controversy. But yeah, that's a weird thing that I think might be responsible. Yeah, that was very strange. A lot of people were talking about that.

Well, it was a big week of news, but before we hop into the news, let's talk about some deals. So first one up in our portfolio, Delta, which is an interoperability focused blockchain network. They raised $11 million from variant DBA, us at Castle Island, Figment Capital, and Mavis 11. Really excited about this one. So congrats to Delta. Next up we have BitLayer, a Bitcoin Layer 2 network. They raise 9 million from Polychain, Franklin Templeton, and SCB Limited. Then it's semantic layer. This is an infrastructure provider for decentralized applications. They raise $3 million from Figment, Hack VC, robot ventures, and others. Then you have Kiva AI, decentralized data labeling protocol. There is 7 million from

coin fund, hash key, and breed VC. Next one is layer. a developer tooling platform for Ethereum, they raised $6 million from 1KX, Fabric, and Harrington Capital. Then we have Open Gradient, a decentralized AI protocol. There is 8.5 million from A16Z crypto, Coinbase Ventures, and SV Angel. Here's a new fund, Vanek Ventures, which is a venture fund from the global investment manager Vanek. They raised $30 million for their first venture fund. So we were actually with these guys, what, last week or the week before?

Yeah. Really sharp team. So excited to do some. deals with Veneck. Yeah, congrats of Wyatt and Juan over there as well as the Vannick organization, two very talented GPs. Lastly, Yala, startup developing a Bitcoin-backed stable coin. There is 8 million from polychain, ethereal, and anagram. And we have a lot to talk about news-wise this week. Before we jump into that, let's talk about the Metrics Minute brought to you by Coin Metrics. Today we're providing a quarterly update on the Bitcoin mining ecosystem in Q3.

Bitcoin's 30-day hash rate grew by 11% in Q3, rising to 643 X a hash per second. Bitcoin mining revenues fell to $2.5 billion in Q3 down 32% as miners adjusted to the April halving event. Transaction fees remained subdued throughout the quarter with a brief spike to $6 million daily following Babylon's launch of Bitcoin staking in August. This is driven miners to diversify revenue streams, including renting our rackspace regenerative AI and developing platforms to tokenize RWA's, such as Marathon Digital's pilot to tokenize whiskey barrels. Among mining pools, Spider Pool has the highest rate of empty blocks with three and a half of their mining blocks containing no transactions. That is your metrics minute. I had no idea that there were tokenized whiskey barrels.

Yeah, I'm interested. I'd like to learn more about that. Bourbon or whiskey? Can you redeem them for the underlying commodity? That's the question. That is the question. I wonder what the secondary market looks like on that. First time I'm hearing about it.

Although a barrel might be a lot. It would take me a very long time. We get through an entire barrel of whiskey. Yeah, you can't be a barrel of whiskey, unless you want to put like a fountain in your kitchen or something. Yeah, I would probably take me more than my entire lifetime, actually. Well, it is another busy deal week. Anyone out there who thought that maybe the Harris campaign would have told the SEC,

hey, just cool off for a little bit, like 26 more days. If there are some things going on that you're working on, maybe just cool the jets and let's get through this election. That didn't happen. So the SEC was pretty active this week. I want to talk first about this Cumberland one, because I think this is the most egregious one I've seen in a while. So the SEC has charged Cumberland DRW.

So Cumberland is the crypto asset subsidiary of DRW. This is Don Wilson's firm out of Chicago. They're a market maker, liquidity provider in the crypto space. They've been charged with running an unregistered dealer in securities. And the SEC is saying that since they have facilitated trades in Polygon, Solana, Adam, which is the Cosmos token, Algo, the Algo. the Algaran token and Filecoin, that makes them a unregistered securities dealer, which to me is just crazy. And I think the Cumberland response is spot on. It basically says, today we became the latest target of the SEC's enforcement first approach to stifling innovation and preventing legitimate companies from engaging in digital assets.

This comes despite bipartisan pushback on this approach in the most recent House Financial Service Committee hearing in which the SEC was called. called the rogue agency, cited for its failure to work with Congress and was taken to task for abusing its power. They go on to say that they have been engaged with the SEC for years. They've gone back and forth for five years in good faith conversations, explaining their business model, submitting thousands of pages of material in making their senior compliance and management personnel available for a bunch of interviews. And then today's complaint was the first time that the SEC has actually outlined the specific transactions that were at issue. It also says that the SEC has asserted that they need to become a broker dealer.

They disagree with that, but they actually did become a broker dealer in 2019. And then we're told by the SEC just come in and register. And when they did that, they were told that their broker dealer could only trade Bitcoin and ETH, which are actually both commodities and not actually under the jurisdiction of the SEC. So that makes no sense. So this whole thing is just completely insane to me. I have more to say about it, but I'll take a pause there. Yeah, I thought their statement was very strong.

They said, quote, we're not making any changes to our business operations or the assets in which we provide liquidity as a result of this action by the SEC. They also say, quote, this time the SEC's approach seems to be a game of catch 22 where the ability to come in and register, quote, is just a mirage. Many people have said that credit to them for holding firm on this. Just crazy to me. So let's take a little bit of a history lesson. in November of 2013, the CFTC charged Don Wilson and DRW with price manipulation on, I believe it was, swaps. Could you take a guess on who the chair of the CFTC was back then? Was it Gary Gensler?

It was Gary Gensler. So that was not something that DRW took lightly. They fought it in court. And five years later, so in December of 2018, a judge dismissed this market. and manipulation case against GRW and actually came out with what I think is probably the must be the greatest phrase ever uttered if you're on the other side of one of these cases. The judge said, quote, it is not illegal to be smarter than your counterparties in a swap transaction.

That's what the judge said when he dismissed this case. That's great. So fast forward a little bit. You know, who's the chair of the SEC? It's Gary Gensler. He's out for Don Wilson again. and I think it's going to be the same type of thing. So this is going to take four or five years to play out,

assuming that the next side of the SEC wants to actually run with this, which they definitely shouldn't. But ultimately, this is going to be a case that I would think gets thrown out, and it'll be something along lines of it's not illegal to break laws that don't exist. Yeah, I mean, I think the ambiguity around the regulatory status of the assets, you know, it's a clear point in Cumberland's favor. They even point out in their status. that ETH was considered as security.

Now it's not. It's a moving target, as they say. Yeah, we'll see what happens. But credit to them, and I'd like this pattern of crypto firms, just sticking up for themselves and not rolling over to the SEC. It's just targeted harassment. There's nothing in this for the taxpayer. So just keep on pouring money into these cases.

There's a clear answer to this. Either you pass legislation or the SEC actually just does this job and proposes rules here in this industry, because what we have right now just clearly does not cover this category of asset. So also in SEC news, crypto.com sued the SEC all the way around in order to prevent them from, quote, unlawfully expanding its jurisdiction. This comes two months after the SEC issued crypto.com a well's notice, warning them of potential charges.

What do you make of this one? I mean, you see the pattern here. So crypto.com has a retail platform. So it looks like they're about to get charged with the same thing that Coinbase and Cracken and others have been charged with running an unregistered securities platform. They also have a trading desk. So same thing that Cumberland just got charged with. So basically a preemptive strike against the SEC,

but the SEC will probably sue crypto.com at some point here in the next two weeks, is my guess. So elsewhere in litigation, I thought this is pretty interesting. Boston federal prosecutors charged a whole bevy of market-making firms. I'll admit I'd never heard of any of them. Got bit, ZM, Quant, CLS Global, My Trade. for, I guess, wash trading and fraud, illicit market making. And the FBI actually set up a fake coin called Next Fund AI in order to help them with a sting. That was pretty interesting.

Yeah, so I think you can put this in the category of, you know, this looks like the prosecutors got this one right. This just seems like a pretty rogue group of individuals here. Did you look at the websites for any of these companies that were charged? I'd never heard of any of them. No, I don't know them. I mean, it looks like they were AI generated. I wonder if these were actually real people on the websites. But I guess the gist of it was some of these firms were cutting deals with these longer-tailed tokens that I'd never heard of.

And basically just watch trading them back and forth to give the appearance of trading volume. And there were some quotes, I guess from the FBI must have just been plugged in. and with this fake token that they created, where some of these firms are saying, hey, look, if you need this thing to go from like $1 to $2, we can work that out. It's just, it seems like pretty clear manipulation. So yeah, the SEC also civilly charged these entities.

So to be clear, you know, we're not against the SEC unilaterally at all by any means. Sometimes they do get things right. Yeah, I mean, you want to see them go after the bad actors, but you get someone like Cumberland here that's been. trying to fall into compliance here, but just has no clear path. It's not like Cumberland is doing any of the stuff that was mentioned in this federal charge. So, yeah, the SEC has an important role, but they're not really stand in their lane for that important role. Next up, our favorite topic on this podcast, World Liberty Financial, the DFI project linked to President Trump.

They've announced their ambition to raise $300 million at a $1.5 billion dollar valuation via Tokyo. sale next week. This token will apparently be strictly for governance. Are you hopping on the white list? So we had our IC meeting as we always do earlier in the week but I didn't see this pitch. Does this mean that so are we just not seeing this deal? Yeah, I guess I guess we missed this deal. Is that because you said bad things about them? That could be yeah that could be it. So there also was a New York Times article further holding their feet to the fire this week. So I'm amazed that they went ahead and did this despite the kind of universally negative reaction from both the crypto space and the press. I'm shocked, honestly.

Yeah, I don't know why they're doing it, but it looks like they're doing it next week. All right. So next up, there was an HBO documentary this week. It was called Money Electric, the Bitcoin mystery. and it suggested that Peter Todd, who's an early Bitcoin developer, is Satoshi Nakamoto. What do you think? I don't think it's him, obviously. I think the evidence they presented is very flimsy.

I mean, it had to do with like forum posts on the Bitcoin talk forums. There was no direct evidence. Obviously, Peter Todd didn't endeavor to prove that he was Satoshi. He appeared in the documentary, but he was sort of just laughing it off as is his right. So I think they, and he was also. 17, I believe in 2007. So he was young. Bitcoin is a system required advanced knowledge of cryptography, distributed systems, obviously programming, and economics. Like, it's not plausible to me that a 17-year-old, even, you know, Peter Todd is a genius by all measures. It's not plausible to me

that a 17-year-old would have that breadth of experience at that age. And, you know, he's never aimed or claim to be Satoshi and we don't have any actual evidence, you know, leading us to believe that he is. So I think they got this one totally wrong. Yeah, I'm glad I didn't pay for reactivating HBO to watch this because if that was the conclusion, I just don't think that's very realistic. I mean, to be clear, he is a genius and he's probably in the list of 50 people that could have done it, but I think there's just strong evidence that it's not him. Yeah, I appeared in the documentary briefly.

Oh, you were in it. Yeah, someone mentioned that to me. So what is? The clip was of me talking about Terra right after the collapse on Bloomberg. What did you say? I think I was just calling it a Ponzi, basically. I don't know why they put that in there. I didn't watch it either, to be honest with you.

I'm still going for the lab leak hypothesis. I'm going strong on the lab leak hypothesis. Yeah, I think more and more people are starting to come around to that. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I don't have evidence either, but that's the same for the for this documentary. So we're on equal epistemic footing there. You could have just done your own documentary. Maybe we should. Yeah. I mean, I like the idea. It'd be very satisfying. It kind of does fit with the pattern of the evidence, I think, that we have. But either way, like, it does, you know, I was a couple of journalists called me and asked me about the documentary and they're like,

why do people even care about this? I told them, like, this is the greatest mystery. It's certainly the greatest mystery in the contemporary era, possibly the greatest mystery of all time. I mean, this guy invented a brand new commodity from scratch. It's worth over a trillion dollars. Satoshi will one day be the richest person on earth, probably not too long from now. And they never harvested the fruits of their labor, not one cent. They made hundreds of billions of dollars from this thing and in a totally self-sacrificial way, created this thing, made it their gift to the world, and vanished.

That is incredible. We can't forget that. I think it is one of the greatest mysteries of all time. I mean, maybe we'll put that out on the warpcast for a question of the week. And maybe I'll qualify it by saying what are the greatest non-religious mysteries of all time. Yeah, like Atlantis maybe is a mystery. Like how the pyramids were built. How are the pyramids?

Yep. That's a good mystery. That's what I was thinking. Was the moon landing real? Maybe that's a mystery. The JFK assassination. I don't know. What are the other big mysteries?

You tell us. I don't know. I'm pretty sure the moon landing is real. I agree. By the way. Yeah. Yeah, I don't have time for that one. Yeah.

Who killed JFK is definitely up there. That's a big mystery, undoubtedly. We could find out in 26 days. You think so? Yeah. For sure. So you think the answer is just sitting in a classified vault somewhere? Uh, I don't know if it's in a vault or not,

but I think that there's a answer to that. question. Yeah, I think we deserve to know the answer. Trying to think of other big mysteries. Like, uh, there were certain ships that disappeared that people still wonder about, or there's the plane that disappeared. The Malaysia, the Malaysia plane. That's a mystery. I mean, I wouldn't put that up there with Satoshi. Wasn't there a ship that disappeared or, am I remembering this right? There's a ship that disappeared and then all of the passengers and crew were missing, but the ship was totally intact. Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah. I need to look this one up. And that's another mystery. It's like they vanished what happened to them. Oh. What about these unidentified flying objects lately? Yeah, I would say UFOs, Roswell. What happened in Roswell?

That's a mystery. There's a lot of mysteries in the Amazon that I think we haven't discovered. Yeah. Like law civilizations where we've done some aerial imaging and it looks like there actually were a lot, there was a lot more civilization there than we thought. I'd say that's a mystery too. Yeah. Amelia Earhart, what happened to her? Didn't she, I thought she died in the play? Well, we don't know. We don't know what happened. What, do you think she landed and just went about her life somewhere? That's the mystery. That's the mystery. See, Satoshi's pretty high on this list.

Yeah, I'm starting to think Satoshi is the biggest mystery. It's up there. All right, let's hop back into the news. Here's an interesting one. Uniswap Labs, which is, of course, the development team behind the Uniswap protocol, they announced that they're going to launch their own layer two. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of maybe a little disconcerting for, you know, the Ethereum value proposition, you know, like all these fees are leaving Mainnet and they will go to these L2s and the fees might not accrete to Ethereum. I think there's something to consider and maybe a puzzle about there. Yeah, that's interesting.

Maybe you just start to see more application-specific L-2s here as a trend. We definitely are, yeah. You know, why suffer this leakage, this fee leakage, to the base layer of blockchain if you can just make an L2? Better user experience for sure, I would imagine. Next up we have Fold, the Bitcoin Rewards app for everyday purchases. They filed an S4, which actually formalizes their plans to go public. via SPAC at a deal valued at 365 million.

That's pretty impressive. So I wonder what the outlook is there. And I think they hold a bunch of Bitcoin in the balance sheet, maybe. Yeah, I really forgot about SPACs. I can't remember the last time I'd heard of a SPAC. Yeah, they were hot there for a minute. The SEC really put the Kajbosch on those. Then we have MetaPlanet, a Japanese investment advisor.

They've adopted Bitcoin as a reserve asset. they have purchased 108.8 Bitcoin. Now they hold 639 Bitcoin or $40 million worth. All right, guys. Keep on going. Pretty good job. Like a mini Michael Sailor strategy over there in Japan. Then we have Terowulfed the Bitcoin mining company. They have sold their stake in their nuclear mining operation. I think that is based on a nuclear facility in Pennsylvania. And they're going to use their funds to diversify the operation to AI data centers. Seems to be a major trend in the Bitcoin mining space, getting into the AI space. For sure.

Next one up here's an interesting one. Stripe has enabled stable coin payments for U.S. businesses using U.S.TC on the Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon blockchains. Someone should have told Stripe that Solana and Polygon are apparently unregistered securities in the eyes of the SEC, but this is great to see. Yeah, really exciting to see these kinds of. I don't know if we can call Stripe traditional, but one of the leading names and payments, give another look to the CryptoSpace.

Stripe had initially supported Bitcoin. They deprecated that in 2018, now they're back with stable coins. It's a very interesting phenomenon. I think we'll see a lot more of these payments companies embracing stable coins. I mean, just think about how ridiculous that is that the SEC is out there saying that Solana and Polygon are unriched securities and you have Stripe facilitating B2B stable coins for a bunch of U.S. businesses on those blockchains. It is just patently absurd.

Yeah, the facts and circumstances, I don't think lend any support to the SEC's case here. Speaking of that, SEC Commissioner Mark Uweda was on Fox this week, and he was pretty blunt. He said that the crypto policies at the SEC have been, quote, a disaster for the whole industry. Hard to argue that. Yeah, stark, but I think very true. And, you know, we're looking to the election, the polymarket's moving. There was a big debate over a polymarket this week.

Do we trust the prediction markets or is this just whales manipulating sentiment? Where do you stand on that? Well, I don't know. Can both be true? Because you do have whales that are moving this market. But it's still a market, right? I mean, does the size of the buyer or seller matter? Yeah, I mean, some people are saying, oh, well, it's just whales, but it's like, okay, well, maybe the whales are informed traders, you know, and maybe they're pricing and information that they have, whether it's polls or some other information they found.

That's why it would be like prediction markets. Like there's money at stake, if you're wrong, you're incentivized to take truth and insert that into the market via prices. So what's what's the theory here that a whale who just wants to see Trump win throws the market throws $10 million into this gets the numbers up and hopes that that influences the polls and gets people on TV talking about hey Trump's up in the prediction market? Yeah, that's it. I've seen this theory a lot on Twitter and it's often from people that are not really that familiar with the market. It's not to be mean, but I mean if you really wanted to spend money and support Trump, wouldn't you just donate to a super pack and buy ads? Wouldn't that be more efficient

than entering into what you think is a money losing position on a prediction market in the hopes that people post on Twitter about it? Yeah, I think that's what you would do. You would do what that guy just did in Florida. I don't know if you saw this, but there's an entrepreneur in Florida who's spending like five or $10 million of his own money to put up Trump TV commercials that he's making and he got Brett Fav to do one of them. Wow. That's probably, if you want to see Trump win, that's probably better than chucking $10 million onto Polymarket. Yeah, there's a lot of conspiracies about Nate Silver and Polymarket and Peter Thiel.

I just find that really far-fetched. Like, if you have millions of dollars and you want to influence the election, buy ads. Don't make losing trades on prediction markets. It's crazy. Oh, I think the people that are saying that Peter Thiel is pulling the strings on Nate Silver out of their minds. There's no way that's... Yeah, it's...

It's ludicrous. The polls have been generally good for Trump, as far as I can tell. But the fifth thing to remember is, I think Shane from Polymarket said this, Trump being up 53 to 47 on a prediction market is not the same as being up 53 to 47 in the polls. It's a huge difference because the prediction market is basically a derivative of the polls. So if Trump was up 53 to 47, which he's not, if he was, the prediction market would be at 95% or something like that. So a six point lead in a prediction market is still virtually nothing.

It's still basically a coin toss. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, you do see this. We're all trying to figure out these prediction markets, really the biggest they've ever been, although they've been around for a while. But you have, like, the day that Trump was nearly assassinated for the first time, he was up to like, what, 75% I think on some of these betting sites?

And obviously, that was not reflective of the actual polling. Yeah, just think of a prediction market as a very high beta derivative of the polling averages. Or maybe, you know, it's compressing some additional data. But yeah, it is very interesting.

It's the first election with liquid prediction markets. And so it's going to give us info on every state in real time. I mean, election night's going to be crazy. The stuff is going to be whipsawing around. I was thinking about that. What's your election night strategy? Are you just going to watch TV the whole night?

Or do you think this is even going to be decided that night? No, I don't think it will. I think it's by design for some reason. Every other country in the world, we can count the votes within a couple of hours. And in America, we love to litigate. So I think in this case, again, it's going to be another thing with the courts, unless it's a landslide in one side. If it's at all close, I think it's going to be days or weeks.

So then it's just kind of a waste of time to sit in front of your TV and watch this thing. Yeah. But I'm going to do it anyway. Yeah, I guess that's what I'll do too. Yeah. It's crazy to think back on the, what was it, the 2000 election between Bush and Gore, and we didn't actually know the winner for weeks after.

I was too young. I wasn't following that. I don't even remember at all. So it went to the Supreme Court, right? Yeah, I went to the Supreme Court. Yeah, I was in high school. It was, but there was no social media back then. And so I was just kind of, maybe if my parents had the evening news on, I would catch five minutes of what was going on.

But it wasn't something I was obsessed with. But, I mean, there was so much suspense, right? Like it went on for over a month or something like that, right? Yeah, you had these hanging chads, these tabulated ballots down in Florida. And there was, yeah, it was crazy. I mean, I cannot imagine what that would have been like in the days of the Internet being fast. Yeah, I mean, it's like it went to the Florida Supreme Court and then, Did it end there?

It went to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yeah. It could again this time. Yeah, yeah, very well could. Yeah. Hopefully it doesn't. Yeah, so the last thing to talk about, Ryan Salem did Tucker Carlson.

I actually thought he had made a really good account of himself there. His main complaint was that he was sort of the only, maybe the only Republican executive at FTCS, and he feels that he was treated unfairly. I mean, he got a much longer sentence. and Caroline Ellison, despite arguably having less culpability. What do you make of it? Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this on the podcast before,

and you know, you'll note that Ryan Salem has never been included in any of these bad boy sections. When we talk about all the people that were at FTX, we think involved in this in a pretty meaningful way, and there's a bunch of them that we talked about. I thought it was a pretty sympathetic appearance. I'm very confident that he didn't know that there was a fraud. going on there. I find it very puzzling that he was charged with campaign finance violations when Joseph Bankman and the mother were in Sam for that matter were not charged. It just seems like a

miscarriage of justice. Yeah and more more than just puzzling I find it infuriating. I mean leaving the politics out of this like we know for sure that in particular Barbara freed help orchestrate Sam's campaign finance activity that that's just that's that's That's very clear. We have evidence of that. And yet the parents from hell face no consequences for that. Meanwhile, Salem is going to, I guess, spend seven years in prison. Seven and a half years. And that was more than what the prosecutors were asking for. You do get the sense, especially from hearing that interview, that if he just flipped in a way that would be kind of lying in his mind, he would have saved himself. but he didn't he didn't do that

I guess he had the integrity not to do it but if he were to come in there and just say yeah I knew about it or I was directed to do this by Sam on these political contributions then he would have gotten off but his view is that he wasn't yeah well see what Nishad Singh and Gary Wang

get their sentencing is coming up if they get even lighter sentences too that's gonna further add to the fact pattern they'll get lighter sentences Caroline Ellison got two years in a camp, right? So I don't know. This looks like a medium security place that Salem's going to, but it has a camp attached to it. I wonder which one he's in. But I think Gary Wang and Nishad will

get two years late Caroline. We'll see what happens there. All right. We'll be back on Monday with a new episode. Everybody have a safe and healthy weekend.