Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - Understanding Stablecoins and Their Utility, Why Stripe is Buying Bridge, Virtual Reality for NFL Quarterbacks

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

A closer look at the emergence of stablecoins, their utility in crypto and cross-border payments, progress in the crypto space that could lead to more widespread adoption, and the strategic logic of Stripe's plan to buy Bridge, a stablecoin platform, for a reported $1.1 billion. At the end: Updates on the Apple Vision Pro, and the secret behind the success of Jayden Daniels in Washington, D.C.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? Doing okay, Andrew. You know, it's the first day of the NBA season, have to sort of get into shape. I did spend 10 minutes before we started recording airing my grievances about bucks disrespect. You know, just back like I never left, man.

You got to sort of ramp up sort of get in the groove. So thank you for accommodating me. I'll try to distill my complaints into a shorter amount of time. It takes a while to get back in the groove. I love it. I thought you were going to be in a good mood because the bucks look pretty good, at least in the first half during the 76ers game. We have to hear about Yonis is going to leave when he's the second longest

10-year player in the NBA. A good move for Ben leads to all sorts of grievances. I cannot wait for another eight months of this. I'm happiest when I'm filled with grievances. That's right. We're all good. Right at home. Okay, well, as for the podcast about technology, I am going to start with an email we got from Chris.

We're not on the goat. Okay, fine. I'm bad. This email from Chris came in exactly a week ago and he wrote, hi guys. So stable coins are kind of looking like a real thing, huh? I've been a long time crypto skeptic, but I'll be fair and acknowledge that stable coins do seem to have some staying power and real world utility. Tether has somehow not gone under and appears to be achieving widespread utilization globally with hundreds of millions of users. PayPal is now completing transactions via stablecoin. Visa is apparently launching a stable coin platform. And that's just off the top of my head, he writes. Is Visa in the same category as Tesla?

I mean, I say Tesla, but I actually don't know what's correct. I believe they are both S's. We're just, just added to the checklist of vocal screwups on a podcast, centered around audio. But what are you going to do? Okay. Visa is apparently launching a stable coin platform. And Chris asks, do you guys have any general stable coin takes? Now, Ben, I got this email. Yes.

I know. I was not familiar with the term stable coin one week ago today. I did flag it. Oh, this is great. This is right in the Sharp Tech wheelhouse. Yes. I know. We're returning to our roots here. You're going to be explaining this to me. You've become too knowledgeable about tech. It's sort of defeating defeating the central concept. So we're going to go back to basics here. The expert normie concept. Yes. Just in case anybody missed it, a newspeg for this conversation is that Stripe plans to buy Stablecoin startup bridge. And according to sources, Stripe plans to pay $1.1 billion for that acquisition. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison confirmed that. news on Twitter, where he said, stable coins are room temperature superconductors for financial services.

Thanks to stable coins, businesses around the world will benefit from significant speed, coverage, and cost improvements in the coming years. Stripe is going to build the world's best stable coin infrastructure. And to that end, we are delighted to welcome bridge to stripe. So we can talk about Stripe and the bridge acquisition a little bit later, but let's nail down the basics. Can you explain what stable coins are for anyone who's uninitiated? And then if you'd like to unpack the stable coin superconductor analogy that Collison offered there,

that would be a fun little bonus as well. Yeah, well, there's a lot to get into. We are back in the world of crypto. Crypto, if this all works out, we'll probably take the crown away from Uber as far as the one of the more long running and painful positions for me to maintain. in the long run where I generally speaking believe in crypto despite overwhelming sort of skepticism and societal disapproval on the other side. And it's interesting. The reason why Stambecoins are compelling is they do sort of capture the best parts of crypto while sort of aliding the worst parts. So to back up, what is crypto? Why is crypto? Why is crypto?

interesting. Crypto is about blockchains. What is interesting about blockchains? Blockchains are this idea that disparate groups can sort of come to a consensus without any sort of centralized authority, right? So right now in

crypto, the core concept, this is sort of the guy, this is the reason why I've been consistently pro crypto as a concept is digital goods. We spend a lot of time talking about digital goods. Like the thing is they have zero marginal costs. They're infinitely replicable, right? I can write one version of

trajectory and that version can be duplicated endlessly. If I can manage to attach a paywall to it, then I can make basically I have infinite upside on the back end. The number of like sending an email to one person is the same as sending email to 100,000 people or whatever it might be. And that is obviously extremely economically powerful, but there's an aspect where digital goods are fundamentally difficult to monetize because it's infinitely duplical. If you can have a gazillion of something on command without any cost to generate that gazillion, then the value, the gating function. It's worth zero. It's worth it. From a sort of monetary perspective. The reason why crypto is interesting is it has all the qualities of digital endlessly duplicable

can be distributed anywhere, access from anything, and yet it has scarcity. There's only one of everything. So if you think about this, so let's back up. So that's the overarching principle, why I've always been interested in crypto and, you know, continue to be. Now, if I want to send money to anyone, right, it has to go through, well, the easiest thing is I can walk up to you and I can give you a dollar, right? Now, if you want to get really pedantic, technically that dollar is just a piece of paper. It sort of has to be backed by the full faith of the U.S. government, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But let's assume that the dollar has sort of intrinsic value.

Maybe we're going to say I give you a piece of gold, right? It sort of has it has an error value. Okay. So I didn't realize how deep into the crypto ideology we were going to get on this episode. But yes, what is Vio currency? No, I am not in the crypto ideology. This is part of what makes it difficult, right? Yeah.

I think there is real functional utility that is going to be important and is unlocked by the tech. Yes. Yes, we'll get to that. So I can go to you in person and I can give you a dollar bill, right? So what is the trust component there? How do you know it's a dot? Well, there's a bit where, again, you're sort of believing it's not a counterfeit dollar bill, but I'm giving it to you. I'm sort of delivering it to you.

I could mail you money in the mail. Not a good idea. That could be lifted. It's untraceable. I mean, maybe that's an advantage for some sort of activities. But by and large, if we're apart and I want to send you money, we need some sort of intermediary. And that intermediary is going to vouch for me, say, I have this money, and then it's going to make it available to you. Those intermediaries are generally banks, right?

So I can send you, now, this could be in the form of like a check, not very secure. But the concept of it is, is this is a representation of money that I am certifying with my signature. You sign it. You take it to a bank and you get that money. What actually happens is the banks behind the scenes are coordinating. to say, yes, this person has money, they're transferring it to the bank, and then it's available sort of in your bank account. Or you could do sort of a wire. So you do a wire, there's there's like fed wire, there's chips or something like that. And then the international version is Swift.

These are actually messaging services. It's like the world's most expensive instant messenger, where they send along the information. This is the person sending it. Here's the account information. Here's XYZ. They send it to the other bank. Now, in the sort of most efficient manner, say we're going between two large banks. So you're sending it from HSBC to Citibank, right? Yep. They will have bank accounts in each other's banks. They're called like Nostro and Vostro accounts or something like that. Basically like Citibank will have an account at HBC and sort of vice versa. And what they will do is this message says, okay, we're certifying

that this is the correct information XYZ and they'll do a debit sort of into that account or out or whatever it sort of makes sense. But the key thing is, is that someone has to actually ascertain who has money. The funds exist. Right. Because HSBC has their own list of accounts. Citibank has their own list of accounts. They have to sort of settle that in some way. If you go across borders, there might be a currency exchange that needs to happen.

Like a currency exchange, like people think about currency and you just look up the number and then you make the exchange. Well, where does that number come from? That number is basically the most liquid market in the world, which is people literally saying, I'll give you X amount of dollars for X amount of yen or NTD or sort of whatever it might, New Taiwan dollars. And you wrote about that aspect of the dollar problem right now and said that introduces a ton of friction in your piece on this on Tuesday.

Right. Well, because the key thing is you need verification, okay? You need a middle, someone in the middle. But doesn't all that verification happen essentially instantaneously these days? Uh, not really. I send a lot of wires internationally. Uh, they do not happen instantaneously. to see, I can promise you that.

Okay, there you go. Okay, I'm not doing much cross-border payments. Well, even a domestic wire takes a few hours, right? And the reason is, is, and you think about it, you need some sort of verification. Now, if you do something like a Venmo transaction, what's happening there is actually the service in the middle, so like Venmo, is acting as the verifier. And what they're doing is they're actually holding a pool of money and they're just, they're changing, like they're shifting the money from one account, one spot in the ledger to sort of

another one. They are the centralized figure that's sort of making that happen. But the point being is there has to be someone in the middle. Right. The thing about blockchains are is no one needs to be in the middle because the structure of them and the fact you have these different entities all sort of as a group verifying the transactions means you get a couple of things for free. Number one, you have, you have instant verification that is completely trustworthy. And there's no one doing it. It's just there. It's sort of like, that's what's enabled by the technology, number one. And then number two, you have a ledger of everything. Like, like, it's funny because people think about crypto in the context of like, oh, criminal uses, XYZ. And the reality is,

is crypto is actually a very poor use for, for a lot of criminal activity. Because everything is, it's all on the ledger. It's all like the blockchain is a criminal conspiracy. That's rule number one for criminals everywhere. Right. So you can trace the transactions. And so there's all these things like like mixers and stuff like that where people try to disguise it. But the reality is it's in many

rays more transparent and more public than sort of a lot of transactions. And so like if the U.S. wants to snoop on everyone's financial transactions, they get like the U.S. controls Swift. Right. And so they kind of control the pipes and they strong arm any bank that wants to do business in the U.S. or with U.S. dollars has to give the appropriate level of access to the U.S. Treasury and

the U.S. in many respects controls the world via the U.S. Treasury. So in blockchain. We were discussing that on Sharp China this week, just for the record. So, yeah. Right. Well, that's a big, they want to build a separate system that the U.S. doesn't have its hooks in, right? And so. Yeah.

Right. And so it's interesting because blockchains are thought of as being, oh, way around this. Actually, they're totally transparent. It's like, okay, not only does the CIA have access to the U.S. Treasury of access, Everyone in the world has access. And you could go through and you can trace all these sorts of things. So as you explain this, the one thing that I'm getting sort of hung up on, I understand that the structure of blockchains allows for scarcity in crypto. Like I recognize that to be true and I could recite it at a cocktail party if someone asked me about crypto's utility. All you need, right. But if we're in the trust tree and I can share without fear of embarrassment, I don't really understand what that.

means and how it works and why that creates scarcity with a good that would otherwise be infinitely replicated. Well, because the ledger is, so the banks are the backup that my dollar is good to you, right? Yeah. And there is friction and fees associated with that. And deservedly so, it's providing a service. The fact I can send money to you halfway around the world is actually great. And so it's there's, whoever's facilitating that should collect a fee. Yeah, that makes sense. That's right. And there should be friction because I actually do want there to be verification that if I'm sending your astronomically large paycheck to you, that everyone on both sides is sure that it's

coming, that it's coming to going to the right place. Yeah. Right. And so blockchains just do that automatically. You sort of get all that for free because every amount like those of the ledger is the list of who owns what. That's all. all in the blockchain. And the transaction is verified by the collective that that shows the blockchain. And an important side note here, and this is really important, a lot of people still have in their heads the like basically the Bitcoin model, which is all this verification is happening by doing these massive calculations that are using all this power.

We're going to get emails talking about the sort of impact. The reality is, is that's definitely the case for Bitcoin. Almost everything has moved away from proof of work, including Ethereum, the other sort of you know, the sort of the big two. Yeah. And so they do proof of stake for Ethereum or proof of stake where basically it's just a different validation method. Different people can be involved. You buy the amount of money you put down, you become a validator.

And so and you get a share of sort of the fees that happen with that. And so it's sort of a fee-based model instead of a we're minting new, new sort of token sort of model. It's different. But the key thing is everyone by participating gets a payoff. And so there's a reason to put money. there, but you have lots of people validating. And so that gets the security because everyone, you know, the original thing is called on Byzantine general problem where the question is if you have lots of independent actors

who can't communicate, how do you get them to all sort of act in coordination? And it was thought to be almost like an unsolvable problem. The brilliance of the Bitcoin paper is it solved the problem. And in that case, it did solve the problem by burning tons of electricity like to do this validation. But there's been a way to figure out other ways to do that that are very efficient. and also very fast. So Solana is another one.

But there's also these called L2 chains that basically sit above. They ultimately distill down to the core chain. But they're really fast. Like doing transactions on these change is very fast, like faster than maybe not quite credit card speeds. Credit cards are sort of the fastest networks. They're also the most expensive. But they're way faster than ACH or wires where we're measuring the speed in a

matter of seconds, not in a matter of minutes or hours that sort of used to be the case. So, so we've, we've solved this sort of environmental problem. We've solved the, oh, and it's way cheaper. Like, just because you're not, and so we solve the cost problem. We solve the speed problem. The big issue is, is the store of value problem. The problem with using Bitcoin in part, we use Bitcoin as an example, but this applied, this applied is like Ethereum as well, is you can't use it for payments or go up and down when

the value is like wildly swinging data. day, right? There's still $1,000, like, multi-thousand-dollar swings in a matter of minutes or hours for Bitcoin. That is not useful as a currency. This is where stable points come in. If you're conducting transactions in crypto, like in Bitcoin specifically, there's risk for any recipient of Bitcoin because the value is correlated to, you know, a market that fluctuates up and down. And so it, that limits the, well, your true Bitcoin apostle would say, Actually, no, Bitcoin is the true currency. It's the U.S. dollar that fluctuates up and down.

But here in the real world, the... Yeah, here in the real world, people are starting to get into stable coins. So what is the utility there? So a stable coin is exactly what it says. The value is stable. It sort of stays fixed. And it's sort of just been settled that what we mean by value is the U.S. dollar. So one stable coin is one U.S. dollar.

Now, there's different ways. to sort of build stable coins, you can literally just hold up like Tether and USC hold assets equivalent to the numbers in there. Now, Tether in particular had some very shady sort of episodes. You also had a thing with USDC where they held their assets at Silicon Valley Bank and it came depegged from a dollar when Silicon Valley Bank went under, but then it sort of popped back up when it said all assets would be guaranteed. But the most common asset would be a U.S. Treasury.

So you have a U.S. Treasury that is backed by the full faith of the U.S. government. It is, it's sort of the U.S. Treasury relative to the dollar is like a savings account relative to a checking account. It's sort of backed by the same entity, but the dollar is sort of more usable, but it doesn't pay you any interest. Like you, it actually is deflating, right? Like sort of all the time. A U.S. Treasury pays interest, but you can't like use it. I can't pay you in U.S. treasuries, right? as far as your paycheck goes.

So what this does is it kind of is almost an arbitrage where it backs the stable coin with U.S. treasuries. And then it says this stable coin is worth $1. Why is it worth $1? Because we hold $1 of treasuries in our bank account that can be sort of converted. The U.S. Treasuries is the most liquid market in the world. So you can, well, not as much as currency,

but it's like we're the most liquid markets in the world. And so you, and so that's the idea. But as a stable coin issuer, you get to earn interest. And so you earn interest on that treasury. That's how you make money. So that's how tether is making money. That's right. That's right.

And they make money from holding the asset. But they've converted this non-usable asset into basically a synthetic dollar, which is, which is a tether. And so people, so the main use case for stable coins, this would be super clear. Stablecoins right now are almost completely a crypto. thing. So if you want to get into crypto, the way you get in is you go to Coinbase or whatever it might be, you buy a bunch of tether or USDC, and then you use that to buy Bitcoin or you use that to do X, Y, Z. Why does that make sense as an on-ramp? Because it's very straightforward. You put $100, you get $100 tether, right? You know exactly what it's worth. Yeah. And then from there,

you could do a lot stuff. But the other thing is you have this whole area called DeFi, decentralized finance, where they're doing all the same stuff banks do. Like, people, this could be a It's like wildcat banking. Like you can do loans. You can have leverage and you do all these like crazy sort of shenanigans. All that stuff depends on there being a stable basis, right? If I'm lending you XYZ, I need to know that XYZ is not going to very wildly in value. And one of us is going to be on the losing end of a swing that we're not in control of.

So it's already spurred all this defy stuff. Stable coins are the basis of that. And so what you're basically getting is you're getting all the parts about crypto that I'm interested it in, you're getting this universal ledger, you're getting this scarcity, you're getting this speed of transaction anywhere in the world, all internet sorts of things, and you're avoiding a lot of the downside, which is the pure speculation on a coin going up, you're getting away from the sort of wild swings in value that you get sort of Bitcoin. What you end up with is basically this currency that operates like the internet. It can go anywhere at any time, it can be executed anytime.

you have a ledger, say if you wanted to, in theory, like, set up some sort of financial, you know, entity, you don't have to build out the whole back end to track everyone's finances and do whatever, and it's sort of opaque, and then you have to build relationships back and forth. You could just build it on top directly on top of the blockchain. And so that's why stable coins are compelling. They really do capture a lot of the upside of crypto and avoid a lot of the downside. Purist would say the way they avoid that downside is by defying the ideological. Yeah, we're trying to get away from the dollar, right?

The evil dollar, sure. That's right. And so, but for prag, I'm a pragmatist. For pragmatists that sort of accept the reality that the U.S. dollar is not going anywhere, what this does is make a U.S. dollar dramatically more capable and possible. Right. And you can use it all over the world with less friction than ever. So in your peace Tuesday.

So the go-to example of like why this is compelling is for right now is sort of cross-border payments, right? Right. And so you think about it, you might be a contractor in a sort of a high inflationary country. Like this is an example with the scale AI. Scale AI has contractors all over the world that are actually doing the annotation of like chat GPT outputs to make sure they work. And in this case. You can see really easily how if you're in the developing. world and you don't really trust the local currency or the local finance industry,

like you might want to just be paid in American dollars. And Stablecoin makes it easier to do that. And if you're the entity paying, the amount of fees you need to pay to do this is drastically lower than trying to pay a fully integrated company that's trying to do all these sorts of things. Just because basically you've offloaded all the hard parts to the blockchain. The actual holding of the money is a very difficult problem. The actual. The actual. reconciliation of accounts is a difficult problem. The actual like ledger keeping. The trust is all a big problem. You get all that for free by using blockchains. And so even and you don't have to repeat that process. If you're paying contractors in 15 different countries, you don't have to

repeat that process 15 different times and you just have sort of a standardized way to pay all the contractors. Right. Well, what you do. What you do is what is necessary, the big challenge with it. So the stable coin prospect is very clear. You basically have this pool in the middle that if you get in the pool, the water can go anywhere, right? The challenge is how do you get into the pool? It's how do you get from, you know, dollars into stable coins and from stable coins into pesos or lira or sort of whatever it might be. It's that on ramp and off ramp. And this is what Bridge is focused on. Bridge is, bridge does has capabilities for entities to issue their own stable coins. So you can imagine like maybe a company internally wants their internal stable coin for,

because they have international operations. It is an easy way to sort of get all the ledger stuff for free, all sort of thing. But the real focus, I think, in this fits in sort of the stripe sort of mindset is how do you actually get, once you get the money into stable coins, it's super clear all the advantages. The question is how do you get the money into there and how do you get it out without people need to get wallets and understand all this, like all the complexity of crypto, it's all in the getting in and getting out. Like that, that's the sort of tricky part.

And so the idea here is if we can build an API, if we can build all these pieces to get in and get out, on top of that AI, people can build businesses that do that. So you can, so people on one side can build businesses that facilitate getting money in, people on the other side can build business that facilitate money getting out. And you don't have to build all that. You don't have to go like a local company, a local entrepreneur, a local bank can see all the tools are there in the API and they build the product on top.

This is building the infrastructure for other companies to come along and build on top of it so that they can leverage all these stable coin advantages. And this is where a lot of the important stuff like know your customer, anti-money laundering stuff, all that. that is real things, which will cost money. This isn't going to be free, right? Like the verification part still matters. And so it's not that this will make it completely free. But Bridge would do that. Bridge would do that on behalf of any other companies that want to build on top of its API.

Is that right? Or do the companies have to handle that themselves? Yeah, TBD, maybe they have the, like, I'm actually not totally sure on that. Maybe it's a case where they just have the tools and other companies can build scalable sort of KYC sort of operations. But the cost, if you think about it, your bank has to know who you are once you start. Once they know who, that's kind of a one-time cost. Once they know who you are, the ongoing costs are this verification and tracking and all the sort of stuff we talked about. So it's not that they will be cost free because KYC and anti-mundering AML, they do cost money.

But those are sort of one-time costs. It's the ongoing, it's the ongoing sort of transactions that basically become nearly costless because all of the hard stuff has sort of been outsourced. And so that's the future that Stripe is looking at. Now, in the short term, it's the geography stuff. In the long term, it's all payments. Like, the blockchain, once you solve the energy problem, once you solve the speed problem, once you solve the sort of scalability problem, which again, I think people who don't follow crypto don't appreciate the extent to which those problems have either been solved or dramatic progress has been made. If the sort of the whole infrastructure in the middle is free to anyone, is transparent to anyone, like how do the old ones even compete?

Right. And so if you're a striped. The old ones being like old currency. ACH wires or credit card wires. Like credit card, you think about stripe, you think about credit cards. credit cards are fast. It's incredible infrastructure and it's extremely expensive. Like multiple percentage points, not basis points, percentage points on every sort of transaction.

I know like credit cards are like you're very expensive. I have to check like what credit card fees are very, very expensive. I'm expensive. I mean, I know that every stratacry customer is expensive. The fees add up. No, exactly. That's my that's my sort of point. Like it's so.

Oh, you're the audience. is very expensive. I thought you're talking to me specifically. No, no, no, no. I was comparing my cost, my cost structure here. I don't want to do you.

Just close too many details here. If you were going to start doing backwards math. But it's, it's, and so, but you're paying for a real, a really valid service. Credit cards are incredible instruments.

It's basically a short-term loan that you get for free because of all the infrastructure stuff that goes into it. Now, stable coins don't necessarily provide that. Like things about like the short-term loan, sort of aspect, right? But the actual money movement components of stuff moving quickly and being

verified immediately and all those sorts of things, it's almost more debit card like maybe it'd be another way to think about it. Again, this is a long ways off. I don't want to over promise what is possible here, but you can certainly see why from sort of a striped perspective, okay, what we do is we build infrastructure so companies can build on top of us. We build infrastructure so it's Yeah, I mean, when you were describing Bridge's value proposition, it basically is just sort of a platform that other platforms are going to be able to build on top of. Right. There's a lot like strike. Describe Bridge as the stripe of crypto, right?

Yeah. But you can see. So in the short term, there's so many benefits here. It's worth a bet just to get into that. But you can also squint in the long run and see like what is actually possible in the long run. People talk about fanciful things like, you know, micropayments. I've talked a long time about why micro payments don't make sense for content, but whatever. You'd have things like AI agents and actual like different AIs, hiring other AIs to do stuff and passing payments back and forth and all the sort of things or things that might happen.

You could talk about people being paid by the hour and getting paid immediately. None of this stuff can happen right now. Everything gets batched because of the costs associated with it. If there's no cost, if there's no friction, what you're doing is you're removing friction from money movement. Like, if there's no friction, we can't even imagine all the use cases that are possible. What we need to look at is other markets where friction was removed and then what happened. Right. So you look at information.

You look at text on the internet. You look at videos on the internet. What happens when you remove friction? Suddenly everyone can do stuff. You have completely different ways of organizing content of sort of surfacing things. you get these sort of power law sort of effects. Again, when you think about it, it's that kind of scary. Like what are the long term implications of this?

But the fact there will be implications is, I think, pretty clear. Unmistakable. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting because crypto and Bitcoin specifically has been sort of pitched as this alternative to the U.S. dollar. This doesn't sound like it would be an alternative to the U.S. dollar. This is cementing the U.S. dollar's dominance. Right. I was going to say the dollar is ensconced here because the value of a stable coin like tether is derived from its relationship to the U.S. dollar.

This is just a more efficient way to transact in dollars long term. It's kind of like increasing the amount of dollars in many respects because it's converting all those U.S. treasuries and assets into dollars, right, like that are actually usable. And now there's other ways to do stable coins. You can do them. So you can back them with crypto assets. you can do algorithmic ones. Right.

I read about algorithmic tethered to the dollar. So there is one called Tara Luna that sort of blew up. They can be broken. Maybe in theory they're nice. They certainly appeal to the crypto sort of approach of we want to be independent of the monetary system. Again, I salute the sort of crypto evangelist and true believers in that we're going to break the dollar's hegemony on all economy transactions. I'm skeptical. I've long maintained that Bitcoin.

I think Bitcoin will remain a thing, but it's digital gold. Like it's, and it's, it's kind of a bizarre thing because like the value of Bitcoin, and this is why you don't want to like sort of dis the true believers too much because it's kind of like monetizing true belief. That's what Bitcoin does, right? Or true skepticism in institutions around the world. Right, right. Which is on the rise.

So Bitcoin's been doing well the last 10 years. Now, you know, Bitcoin tends to move. in line with regular assets which sort of defeat some of the theoretical. But in theory, you can see that sort of concept. I don't think Bitcoin is going anywhere, but it's just never going to be used for transactions.

It's not doable or sort of viable. And you can't really use it as a backing as a universal form of settlement. Like people think, oh, Bitcoin could replace the dollar. It just, I mean, it would have to stabilize to such a degree.

And the reality is, is all world economies are built around fiat currency at this point. Going back to Bitcoin, it would be like going back to gold. I get the arguments for the gold standard. There's strong arguments against it. And there's also the fact that that ship sailed decades ago. And this structure we have of built on issuance and debt and these sorts of things.

And the world sort of trading structure where the U.S. consumer market consumes everything and has this current account. sort of deficit and then pays for stuff with debt, which the importing companies then buy the debt and then they pay for the U.S. military to police it all and make it all work. Like, that's certainly fraying, but it's not like it's so deeply sort of embedded in the way everything works. It's not going to be. I was going to say it's pretty entrenched all over the world.

Yeah. One question in the short term you wrote in your piece on Tuesday. What's interesting to consider is if Stripe anticipates that the stable coin market will become very hot before they would have a chance to build instead of buy, build their own bridge-like platform instead of buying Bridge is, I assume what you were referring to there. Can you tell me more about that possibility and what sort of inciting event you're talking about there? Well, so bridge has built, by all accounts, what is a very good API. You know, that's how Stripe started as well. They've also gotten regulatory approval sort of, particularly in the EU and I think 48 states. And so in EU, they have a license in Poland, which is in the EU so they can operate across the EU, where they are licensed to sort of accept, you know, payments coming in on their rails.

And so that's a big deal and it's very hard. And so there's a lot of value just in that and sort of you're sort of off the ground. Skipping the line. Yeah. Yes, exactly. The big thing that could happen. So number one, there's always talk about central bank digital coins. And this idea is let's just skip this USDC and tether nonsense.

How about the Fed just issues their own stable coin, which is just quite directly backed by the U.S. government? And the point there is, and obviously this is like a lot of true crypto believers' worst nightmare. Because it's like, let's just go, let's just latch straight onto the money. We're not going anywhere. Well, and it's funny because we talk about adopting stable coins. It sounds like this could make sense for a lot of different people and a lot of different markets.

But as that adoption becomes more and more widespread, I can't see any reason why the Fed wouldn't do that. Right. If you want total visibility, let's really get total visibility. The reality is that digital programmable money, it's like obviously useful, right? It's inevitable that that's where we're going to end up. where or other. Now, again, there is an entire separate, which I am pretty sympathetic to a lot of the worries about this, to be clear, right? You think that the U.S. Treasury has a view on everything now. Just imagine until they control the digital currency that everything goes over. So I am acknowledging those concerns. We're not going to have a very deal with debate about them now. It's very easy to freeze every asset you own. That's right. And everything you do is trackable and traceable. And, you know, if you've been paying any sort of attention to the last little bit, that's something that everyone should. should be concerned about.

That's an implicit problem with digitization in general. Like we've talked, we have had philosophical social discussions about the fact when everything is online and visible, suddenly people's supposed sort of concerns and principles. Principles. Constitutional protection. Right?

If you have the power, it's always going to be very tempting to use it. Yes. I hadn't considered that as a long term concern with this ecosystem. Oh, it's a huge problem. Like right now. you kind of need like a wire tap in some respects to like the equivalent of a wiretap to go in and see what people are doing with their finances if it's international. So it's actually quite similar.

Like if people are, if we're converting, if you're having a phone call internationally, the U.S. basically has an unencumbered right to it according to our laws because it's an international. So that's, and that's same with money. Like money goes over Swift like they're looking like they're looking at it. inside the U.S., there is limitations on that because you have to get a warrant, you have get a fire down. And the U.S. can get a warrant. They can go to your credit card company or your bank and get access to your information. But they least have to, like, go through some degree of trouble.

Like once it's all on like the digital coin, it's like, what are we even doing here, right? And so, again, all those are real, not ignoring them, just it should be acknowledged. We're just not going to focus on them. We're focused on utility right now. the reason this will happen is because the utility is massive, right? There's a lot of possibilities here. So number one, if this comes out in the next couple of years, the stable coin stuff is going to explode. And again, Bridge is not about their own stable coin.

They're about infrastructure to leverage stable coins. So suddenly, stable coins are like the way to do lots of money stuff going forward. Stripe is ready for that in a way they wouldn't have been before. It would take them more than two. to three years to develop something comparable to what Bridge has today. That's right. And get regulatory approval in 50 states and the EU. Okay, that makes sense.

So number two is, number two is stable coins have been exploding. And because the utility is real. But it, so again, a few things happen. Number one, the idea had to be invented. Tether's only like six years old. Like this isn't that. This is a pretty new idea. Number two, the change in speed for these L2 chains and the proof of state based

networks, it's just been in the last 12 to 18 months, it's gotten to be a massive deal. Like in where it's actually viable to do transactions with stable coins. And so I think there's a bit where even if there wasn't a central bank coin, stable coins are going, they're on the verge of exploding because the utility's real and a lot of the challenges have been overcome. So there's a bit here like, yes, we're like they have like $15 million in revenue. Paying a billion dollars is insane. But it's a perfect alignment with our business.

we speed run all this regulatory stuff. We get a ready API. And by the way, we think the market's going to explode. This is like this is Instagram in 2012 or sort of whatever it might be. Right. And so which I think is a reasonable and reasonable bet. And then number three, you have this recursive function, which is the act of Stripe making this acquisition is going to spur more interest in an explosion

in this sort of thing. So they almost make their hockey stick by virtue. of just who they are and sort of getting involved. It makes me more confident in the space and the future. And we wouldn't be discussing stable coin for an entire episode of Sharp Tech if Stripe hadn't bought it. And if you want to have like the Steelman critique, it's like, well, you know, does Stripe sort of hit a wall with their sort of base business model?

You know, Adion is sort of like really moving to the U.S. They're better at sort of integrating point of sale and sort of online. and, you know, is Stripe-like Tesla sort of, oh, no, we're going for autonomy. We're not just about building cars. Human rights, yeah. Yeah, now we're building completely new payment rails. That's the sort of, I think, the critique that you would put on this is, this is all a great story, but you haven't actually, have you actually finished building a meaningful business around what you did before? I think that's a fair critique.

I also, at the same time, this is such an obvious bet. Like the if this if this happens, if this is a new payment rail and it's a payment rail that is so much cheaper. And again, it's not cheaper because of regulatory arbitrauss. It's cheaper because it's a fundamentally better way to do transactions. Like because you don't need, you don't need private ledgers and you don't need private verification. Again, you still need KYC. You still need ALM. So it's not going to be free.

But you're taking out a big chunk of the cost. in friction. And that has its own recursive quality. Less friction means more activity, which actually makes it sort of increasing, like larger and larger, and you get a virtuous cycle. I think it's a totally logical bet for a company like Stripe to do. Okay. Well, one bonus note here before we shift gears, Ben says, not sure if you guys are burnt out on discussing AI's effect on employment, but from where I sit in. corporate America. People are way over-indexed on AI job loss and way under index on white collar jobs getting offshoreed to India, Eastern Europe, and or South America. I'm a little amazed.

He had six wise, so I think it's more of a way. Way. Yeah. You only gave it about two whys or three wise. Let's find out how this guy pronounces Visa. I'm a little amazed, Ben says, that this isn't discussed very much in the discourse. Take a look at the career. page of any mid-sized American company and note how many software, IT, or back office job postings are now in Hyderabad, Poland, or Colombia. Ukraine was another huge job center before the war. I'd bet on this affecting developed country employment way before AI. I mean, just following the path

of what happened to manufacturing employment and call centers. So it's not exactly a big stretch. Cheers, question mark. He says at the end, Ben. So I read that because I was reminded of this email, reading about stable coins and scale AI specifically outsourcing all the data labeling to markets around the world. I don't know whether you have any thoughts on the take there from Ben, but it does seem like a trend that's accelerating a little bit. Yeah. Well, I mean, it may not be in the discourse. It's been on trajectory. It's been on podcast. I've talked about this. You go back to say blue collar work. there was two things that hit blue collar workers. The one that people actually focus on is similar to Ben's point, which is outsourcing, right? Or basically the shifting of factories to outside the U.S. The other one was automation, which like manufacturing levels in the U.S.

are up from before all this over the last 50 years, but it's all automated. Like the number of people necessary is lower. So it's a two-pronged thing. It's the internet and information, like the container ships and, you know, long-range aircraft enable this sort of outsourcing, but then automation is this other prong that sort of destroys these sort of jobs. And the analogy to white collar work is the exact same.

Now, we focus more on automation to his point that's in the discourse of with AI, but the equivalent of outsourcing isn't just happening. It's been happening for a while, right? And to his point, it has gone up the stack from call centers to a lot of, software development is done internationally at the stage. India is obviously a huge parts of their economy on this. The Ukraine one is a great one. Oh yeah, a lot of game development. I've talked about the problem of games and asset creation and how the costs have ballooned. A ton of this is done in Eastern Europe right now. And it has been for a long time because of the sort of the lower costs.

And any sort of digital work is easily sort of transported abroad. So yes, these are all like Ben is correct. And it's a real thing. And yes. Yes, this sort of currency makes that more viable. It certainly does. I was going to say, yeah, exactly. It reduces the friction and will be part of, again, a trend that's going to continue to accelerate. Right. Because when you do it originally, you still need fairly large entities on both sides to manage the coordination costs and all this sorts of thing.

This is like the Internet. Like, what do I, what do I do? I am like, we're a larger entity now. When I started chattachshed, I'm one person by myself writing a publication that is competing with New York. times. Now, is it doing the same stuff? No, but the only scarce currency is time and attention. Every bit that people spend reading your techery is time not reading other publications, right? And why can I do that? Because of the total frictionless nature of moving content around on the internet. So, so, you know, you did have, you know, like other smaller publications

that were enabled, but to go truly as a single sort of person was, you know, took a while to build the infrastructure around that. I needed Stripe as a, as a very tangible example, to be able to accept credit cards on my own, but managed subscriptions sort of in a sustainable way. But you fast forward and now when you can do that and you can do it with money and you can do like freelance jobs, you can hire stuff sort of as needed. You don't need these intervening platforms or taking fees and all this sorts of stuff. Now again, will stuff get built up around this? Yes, substack needed to be built up, Right? Like there's still a lot of work to do a single entity. Subst stack makes it a million times easier to get started.

They take care of all the difficult parts. And so you can run, you can run a one person business. And substack will for 10% do a lot of the work. Money can move around. And if you're super like technically savvy, you could say, yeah, I'm, I'm technically savvy enough to write AI questions. And all take stable coins. Thank you. I'd actually rather store my income on the blockchain where it's not going to get deflated to my local currency.

That's great. Most people aren't going to do that. The substacks, what Bridge does is it builds, like substack is made possible by building on top of Stripe. Bridge is say, okay, what's going to be the substact of these countries that are going to abstract away? Like most people shouldn't need to know about stable coins. They shouldn't need to know what they are.

All they know is I suddenly have a way to get paid or to do XYZ or there's new entities that are set up with fundamentally different cost structures because they are built on the assumption of these sort of technologies that weren't possible before. And in that sense, this isn't a one year, five-year play. This is a, this is a, you know, a 50-year play, like that this is going, because it needs to be a wholesale rebuilding of infrastructure. And what we need to do is we need to build the foundation so that other people can come along. And it doesn't need to be an integrated player trying to do everything. It's we're going to build all the infrastructure so there can be new companies created on,

on top of what we have. Well, and as far as globalizing white collar work, you know what used to be an intervening platform that people needed, that is no longer as critical as it once was, an office, Ben. And as that has become less central to the way companies do business, there's going to be competition for white collar work that springs up all over the world. I don't know if we talked about this.

I wrote about this during the pandemic. Yeah, that's what we did have this conversation. like 18 months ago, it's become cooler to talk about AI displacing white-collar workers. But yes, this has been on our radar, Ben. Rest assured. Shifting to a world of work from home and companies building up processes to accommodate. Because you do need to change how you work for it to be effective. Sure.

Be careful what you wish for. Yeah, the cost of living may be a lot lower in Kansas. It's drastically lower in the Philippines, right? And reducing friction is always great in the short term. And it's unbelievably destabilizing in the long term. That's the story of the internet. And now the internet is coming for money. Oh, boy.

Well, to keep things moving and shifting to something completely different at the end, a couple of VR notes here. First, Tim Cook talking to Wall Street Journal about the Vision Pro. He said, I'd always like to sell more of everything because ultimately we want our products to be in as many people's hands as possible. And so obviously I'd like to sell more. At $3,500, it's not a mass market product. Right now, it's an early adopter product. People who want to have tomorrow's technology today, that's who it's for. Fortunately, there are enough people who are in that camp that it's exciting. So that's what Tim Cook said.

And then a report Wednesday from the information, Apple has sharply scaled back production of its Vision Pro mixed reality headset since the early summer and could stop making the existing version of the entirely by year-end, according to multiple people directly involved in building components for the device. As part of that decision, Apple suspended work on a second-generation version of the high-end device for at least a year, according to another person, directly involved in the company's supply chain. If that report is accurate, do you have any quick takes on that development? I mean, this suspended work for a year was a particularly funny line. If you used to spend work for a year Technological fraud.

Just call it at that point. You killed it. Okay? Let's be honest here. So, yeah, this was, I mean, Tim Cook is always a company, Matt. Actually, I've never interviewed Tim Cook. I think he's, you know, him and sort of Andy Jassy are the two sort of, you know,

it was Jeff Jeff Bezos before. I never got him before, before he left, unfortunately. Tim Cook is probably the big name. I have the least interest in interviewing. He is always on message. He never deviates, which makes this honestly tepid endorsement of it. This looks like an admission of failure. Like if you read Tim Cookies, this is like, yeah, that didn't work out so.

It's hard. It's very expensive. But enough people have it. Yeah, dude. That's saying no, not enough people have it. Sorry. And maybe this actually gives guidance to why it was okay for Zuckerberg to announce they are. He did need to get on stage until Apple they screwed up. Apple might have already realized that, yeah, this is not going anywhere. This is sort of a mess.

Time to pivot. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the, and I think like, we were on it. We were nailing the Vision Pro. Where's the stuff? Where's the content? Maybe Apple internally was on a suit or like, what's the point of making stuff for this if no one's going to use it. We did get, we did get the NBA All Star or All Star sort of footage nine months later. I mean, like, yeah. And I'll tell you what. I will. I will. I will. I'm going to go to an Apple store and demo that sometime in the next couple weeks. Like, I'm excited to check it out. I would have been literally a hundred times more excited to check it out had that been ready when they launched. You can't just wait nine months. I mean, like it's, they never really understood how to build momentum for this particular product.

Yeah. I mean, you know what? It's okay. The Vision Pro is still awesome. It's like one of the best demos ever. You give it to anyone to try. It blows their minds. Is it possible that we'll,

look back on this as just an amazing piece of technology and a bad product that Apple didn't know what to do with because it's been described as a flop. Look, Apple made $17,000 gold Apple watches. Apple made the Newton in the 90s, right? Like, it's okay. Apple's not perfect. They're failable. They're, they are still the kings of miniaturization, the kings of chips, the kings of making beautiful objects. Now, those beautiful objects shouldn't be metal and glass if they're on your head. But like it's fine. It's okay.

There's a bit where, you know, at some point has Apple crossed the line where all the secrecy doesn't help them is sort of like an ongoing debate. Like me and Gruber will talk about every few months or so. There's a bit here where it's okay to screw up. It's not like you don't screw up the iPhones and good for you. And that's really important not to screw them out because they're important to the bottom line. But I think Division Pro as we've talked about, it seems.

clear it was a mistake. Facebook got it right. Like just the market structure right. A cheap like for VR focus on being comfortable and immersive and under $1,000. And for AR, that's where that that's that has to be sort of the long term focus. And this was maybe went in the wrong direction. And that's okay. It's okay. Move on.

And maybe this is sort of weighing the grounds to do that in a certain respect. Yeah. Well, I mean, I say it's not necessarily a plot. Yeah. What he said, yeah, what he said was the exact opposite. is what he meant. But I mean, I don't know. Yeah. And I am curious to see what direction they go with the technology.

The device itself was incredible to use. There's just not really a market fit. So obviously, it is a flop as a product. But the technology is still really cool. And I'm glad that's it's. That was the big thing about the Facebook stuff is obviously there was never to be much of a product for $3,500. The big thing that, at least from my perspective,

and obviously some people disagree, but from my perspective, it just showed that the fundamental direction was wrong. You can't make AR with a headset. Well, like, you just, you have to go straight to AR. And in the meantime, you do need to go for volume and make it more accessible and pass through that is good enough is fine because no one's going to actually use that for real sort of use cases. And you can see how Apple had this sort of vision of people want to see and they want to be out there and interact you with the real world. That's right. But there's no shortcuts to doing it. You, you have to go straight to the AR glasses. And again, Apple has tremendous capabilities and possibilities in this space. So we'll see what happens. We shall see.

I'll tell you what, I'm a professional podcaster. And this is a professional podcaster segue. We're going from pass through to pass rush related to the mixed reality discussion. We're going to the NFL. I mean, it's good because you had such an easy segue because this is about VR. You get a VR to VR. But no, you sort of looped around and came back in. Pass through to pass rush.

I'll read from the athletic. Six weeks into his rookie season, rookie quarterback jaded Daniels is the talk of the league and part of nascent MVP conversations. Perhaps the only thing quicker than Daniel's accelerated growth is the speed at which he sets the simulations in his VR headsets. It moves faster within the VR than actual human beings, Daniel said. Once you get out there, everything slows down.

I know this is coming. I've seen this before, and it moved 20 times faster in VR. So, Ben, you and I both read this article earlier this week. I was fascinated by what's happening here. The story continues from there, and we can link it in the show notes. But the gist is that Jaden Daniels, who, for anyone who's not a football fan, his success in D.C. this year is one of the biggest stories in the NFL this season. I mean, have you officially finally abandoned the Cowboys?

Are you going to jump on the bandway? again? I feel like it would be pretty shameful for me to become a commander's fan these days. No, no, what was shameful was you growing up in Washington, D.C. and being a Cowboys fan just to make your dad mad. Yeah, exactly. And I don't want to compound that error or disgrace. No, you have to, you have to embrace the disgrace. Because compounding the error, compounding the error would be raising Charles as a Cowboys fan and condemning him to your bad choices.

What you need to do is you need to take the L and say, you know, I don't want my son to repeat. I don't want him to bear my sins for the rest of his life. And so you need to just go after the show. I'm going to order you a commander's hat. Great. And a little baby commander's jersey. A baby commander's jersey. And Charles is going to be a commander's fan.

You owe it to your son. Do you want to just because you were a little brat. that wanted to reject your father, just like you want to... Issues with authority. That's right. That's right. You're going to curse your son with that. From day one.

Go Cowboys. Oh, I'm going to now stay true to myself. And sorry, Charles. You're going to bear the brunt. Nope. You're a commander's fan. Let me clarify exactly where I was until 30 seconds ago when I got that pep talk from you. I am not a Cowboys fan anymore.

I quit the Cowboys like seven years ago. And I had made up my mind in, like literally until we were recording this podcast, I'm just going to stay on the sidelines for eternity, but I'm going to make sure that Charles roots for his hometown team. It doesn't make the same mistakes I did. But maybe as part of that process, I also should cheer for the commanders.

That's right. You need to provide an on-ramp for him. Okay, yeah. Yeah, I went to a Packers game a couple weeks ago, brought my dad in. Great, great. You know, we were both excited when they kicked the, you know, the Rams rear end. And you know what?

It's about Charles. It's not about you. So how long do I wait? how long do I wait before I explain to him that back when I was a kid, I made some horrible mistakes. There's no need to explain that to him. There's no need to explain that to him. No.

Let the past be the past. It's a bright new future, you and Charles. I'll have to talk to some friends and say they cannot share photos from the mid-2000s. In any event, Jane Daniels. I mean, this is a conversation a lot of parents have. That's true. A familiar challenge. Jane Daniels is one of the biggest stories in the NFL this.

season. Remarkably, as a rookie, it's not insane to think that he could be in the MVP conversation by the end of the year. And he starts every day working in a VR headset that was created by a German company named Cognolize. It was founded in 2019 by Verena Krakow and Christian Hartman. And he spent two years running through his playbook on there. It began during his final year at LSU. Which, by the way, his final year at LSU was drastically better than any year he had in college previously. Right? Yeah. He was like a pretty ordinary prospect.

And then a senior year he turned into the literally won the Heisman trophy and was a top three pick. So I just, I want to make people aware that this is happening because I think it's really cool. Do you have any thoughts on this particular use case? It's an amazing story. But there's a bit where this this already happened. And there's certain coaches that are way behind. the eight ball because of this. And I just actually didn't fully click for me until this story that I put two and two together.

One of the long running jokes on sort of Twitter or like Bill Simmons talks about this all the time is all these coaches that can't manage the clock need to play more madded. And what's no, it's the same thing. It's a hundred percent true. It is a great point. And by the way, it breaks down by generation. You can tell the coaches that grew up playing mad at. Sean McVeigh is a freaking wizard with this stuff, and you know he's played hours of Madden, right? Like there's just this bit where it's because you're encountering completely novel situations.

And so you can't, it's almost like goes back to our bitter lesson sort of concept, right? You can't pre-program everything and under X, Y, Z we do Y. You have to just know how to respond in different situations. The way you do that is by iteration, is by practice. And football is fundamentally constrained in this from, say, a coach's perspective. You're not in that situation that often, once a week, 17 times a year, right? But you could actually simulate it multiple times a day again and again and again and again where you just intuitively know what to do.

Quarterback's the same thing, especially with the NFL, fewer and fewer practices for sort of obvious reasons. Even when you're practicing, it's not like a game. Like the level of effort and out just the craziness that you have to have to play football at full speed, you're only getting that a few times in year. But you can simulate it with VR. And yes, you could maybe get that aspect with MADD. But now you think about a quarterback, I've always wondered. Like, how do you actually figure out how to make decisions when you have these, you're never going to have this sort of physical fear factor of a 300 pound, like crazy athlete bearing down on you?

When I say you can't simulate it, you can't simulate it. You can't simulate it in practices and whatnot, but they're simulating it in this headset. Right. And you have the three years to do. Flight simulator. That's right. You're seeing all around you.

And that's right. That's why we have flight simulators. That's why F1 drivers spend most of their time in simulators. Like, because there's just stuff you only get through particularly novel situations that you're not sort of familiar with. Like you only can get that through iteration. And when you're dealing with an area where iteration is,

is sort of impossible. This is the whole thing with a like talking about digital twins. What, what's the interest in digital twins? Well, because you can get, you can iterate. You can run a gazillion simulations.

Like the, the, the, if you talk to like sort of waymo or whatever, they're like, oh yeah, we've, yeah,

we only have a few hundred cars on the road, but they've gone through a gazillion hours of simulations, right? Like where, where it's sort of cost free and you get to experiment and try all these sorts of things. And, uh,

yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a great article. because it's super interesting. The connection to his career progression is startling, particularly that last year at LSU.

We can't emphasize this enough as football fans. It's not normal for somebody to just all of the sudden turn into a Hysman winning quarterback in the final year of their college career and a top three pick. It changes his career. It changed Charles's life. Like Charles is now going to grow up a happy commander's fan because of VR. Thanks to this VR headset that has transformed Jaded Daniels. But the other thing about a story like this is it's one of those stories where it's kind of, it's a shock when you read it.

But then it's not a surprise. Like, of course. Of course this solves the problem of how to be a good quarterback. Of course it solves the problem of how long until VR headsets are at every single sort of pre-draft interview and combine. So they can actually see you operate sort of in this sort of situation. It's such an obvious sort of win. And yes, quarterback is a very specialized position. There's not that many in the world.

But number one, this might make more good quarterbacks. We are in struggle with the dearth of them. We need it. Yep. But number two, it's very easy to see how this becomes useful and viable for so many other sorts of things. And yeah, it's a great story. It's one of my favorites in a while. Yes.

Well, we'll put it in the show notes so people can check it out. And, hey, if you're unaffiliated, hop on the commander's bandwagon with me. Jaden Daniels is going to take us great places. Yeah, that's true. Wherever you are, cheer for your hometown team. And if I'm being 100% honest, I've been silently cheering for the commanders for the last six weeks because when the commanders win, everyone in Washington, D.C. is in a much better mood. And so I'm rooting for my neighbors to be happy. But yeah, I'll hop on the bandwagon. Thanks to my friend, Ben Thompson. Here we go. Okay. Well, on that note, hopefully the bucks can pull it out and maybe the national media will even give

them some respect this year. You'll stop trying to trade Janus. But Ben, no, we don't need any respect. I just need, you know, whatever. That's right. Everyone at the top of the show learned Ben is happiest when he's aggrieved as a Bucks fan. So we'll keep that tradition going for another year. And Ben will keep the Monday mailbag tradition going next week.

People can send questions to email at sharptech.fm. I hope you have a great couple of days. And I will talk to you on Monday. Yeah, go commanders. Truly, until they play the Packers. Go Packers. Oh, boy. Packers exceptionalism here. Makes me sick.

I'll talk to you soon. Talk to you later.