40 Burst results for "Austin"
The Bitboy Crypto Podcast
A highlight from How Crypto Will Change The World
"In case you missed it, Eric Voorhees delivered a fantastic keynote at the Permissionless Conference in Austin, Texas. He talks about why the rule of blockchain is better than the rule of law, gives the SEC direction for what they should do next, hint, get out of the effing way, and tells us why crypto devs should be given Nobel Prizes. I put together some of the best clips from his speech, so let's dive in. It's time to discover crypto. He starts with this. Raise your hand if you're here because you love banks. No hands. Crickets. Crickets, okay. We know why we're here. We're here because we don't like banks. Yes, okay, sure, Lambo's good, but all right, Eric, come on, let's get with it here. Raise your hand if you're here to get your eyeballs scanned by Worldcoin. All right, right there, he's talking about Worldcoin. I feel bad for the people who actually did scan their eyeball. Raise your hand if you're here to celebrate KYC or other forms of wholesale spying on innocent people. All right, raise your hand if you're here for a rebellion. All right, there's some hands. And that's ultimately true. I think there's a little bit of rebel in all of us. Cue the James Dean clip. You're tearing me apart. All right, this next clip, he's going to talk about how the ethos of crypto is similar to the ethos of a frontier America. And as I was working on this speech, I realized that the theme was going to match the name of the event, Permissionless. I love this name. It's one of the best words that captures the essence of our industry. It is radical. It is rebellious. It's non -compliant. It's American. This is America. It's American. You know, a kind of kid, but at the end of the day, he's ultimately right. We need to take back control because that would be the American ideal, and we have lost control of our money. All right, well, let's hear why Eric Voorhees says Bitcoin is interesting. Why was Bitcoin interesting? It interesting was because it was permissionless. Bitcoin invented permissionless money. And with the invention of smart contracts on Ethereum a few years later, we had all the tools we needed to build an entirely permissionless financial system. Permissionless financial system? I mean, what does that mean? Permissionless. They can't stop Bitcoin, and by they, I mean the big bankers. Bitcoin is bigger than them already, and they hate it. All right, now you might be saying, well, Deezy, isn't cash permissionless? Well, let's see what Eric has to say about that. You may say that cash is permissionless, but not if you're sending it across any distance. Try moving $10 ,000 across a border, and you will be swiftly reminded of the permissions that are imposed on you. No, cash is not even permissionless. And he brings up a great point right there. Cash isn't permissionless. We have it in our idea, oh, it's free, I can exchange freely, but like he says, jump on a plane with, he says, $10K. Imagine a million dollars. Imagine trying to move a billion dollars. With Bitcoin, that is possible. And all right, that sounds great and all, but how can it change the world? Consider that essentially all action in the economic sphere requires money. And in a world where most people struggle to put food on the table, the economic sphere is literally the arbiter of life or death for billions. And when he talks about arbiter, he means the people making decisions for you, sometimes against your own best interests. That's why I like crypto because it frees us from that. Most people don't have the luxury of working toward their passion. They work, they toil, they transact because they need to live.
Bloomberg Businessweek
Fresh update on "austin" discussed on Bloomberg Businessweek
"It has to be if you build it, people know what to do with it, they know how to use it, and they know how to ensure that equality is in place in the education arena. We cannot exist in space when we have a zip code based education where children one mile down the road has incredible connectivity and experiences with digital technology and children right down the street don't. That is the divide that we have spent more than 10 years addressing and the commitment we are making. Got to run, but great to get some time with you. Rose Stuckey Kirk, Chief Corporate and the Responsibility Officer at Verizon on Zoom from Austin, Texas. This is Bloomberg. The United States Border Patrol has exciting and rewarding career opportunities with the nation's largest law enforcement organization. Border Patrol agents enjoy great pay, outstanding federal benefits and up to $20 million in recruitment incentives. If you are looking for a way to serve something greater than yourself, consider the U .S. Border Patrol. Learn more online at CBP .gov slash careers slash USBP. That's CBP .gov slash careers slash USBP. Everything. Global market news changes in an instant. So don't miss a minute. Listen to Bloomberg Radio Time anywhere around the world on the iHeartRadio app. Tune in. The Bloomberg Business app and iHeartRadio .com. Now your company news headlines. On Bloomberg Radio. From Bloomberg World headquarters, I'm Steve Rapoport. Prosecutors begin their case in the fraud trial of FTX co -founder Sam Bankman Fried. They portrayed Fried in opening statements as man a who lied to the world while only telling his friends and girlfriend the truth of what was going on behind the scenes at FTX. More on that from Sonali Basak from Bloomberg. She joined Bloomberg surveillance this morning to give her take on what she described as one of the biggest white -collar trials in U .S. history. Here's
CRYPTO 101
A highlight from Ep. 567 Full Update on the Solana Network with Austin Federa
"All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast where I am your co -host Bryce, and I'm joined by my trusty compadre, Mr. Brendan Veman. Brendan, how are you doing today? Hey, I'm doing good. Welcome back everyone. You're hanging in through the chop in the market. You're not overtrading this, are you? No, definitely not. We definitely are seeing a bit of range -bound activity, but we're surviving it. Good, man. You saw the Philly game the other night, I hope. Yeah. Big Eagles fan over here. I'm satisfied. We're 2 -0 now. Your boys are looking good. Let's freaking go. Your boys are looking good, and yeah, fantasy season. We've got a whole Crypto 101 podcast, 12 -man fantasy league that we've been competing with, so it's been a ton of fun. And yeah, anyhow, we're joined by an awesome guest. This is one that we've been really, really excited to dive into. Everybody who's listening has probably heard of Solana. The soul token is burst onto the scene, and it is just an incredibly vibrant community. You've had your members go across the world to some of the hackathons that Solana continues to host. And we're really excited to speak with the head of strategy, a gentleman and a scholar named Austin Federa, who is joining us today. Austin, welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast. Hey, excited to be here. Thanks for having me on again. Yeah, we're excited. Yeah, we had you on maybe six months ago or something, and it's just crazy how quickly Solana keeps rolling out developments and partnerships. You guys don't sleep. I know you're across the world right now hosting hackathons, and it's just crazy. So before we really dive into all the new things that have been going on, just catch us up for new listeners who are curious about what the Solana Foundation is and how you guys are a part of the ecosystem here. Yeah, so we are the nonprofit Swiss foundation that's sort of behind a lot of the ecosystem development work of the Solana network. And so you can think of this very similar to the role the Ethereum Foundation played in the Ethereum network. But we are basically an organization that got a grant from basically the Solana network at the beginning to issue grants on the network to act as a group that helps sort of solve those public resource goods problems that no one is economically incentivized to necessarily solve without a nonprofit stepping in. And that's kind of the work that we do, right? We're not the main marketers of the network. We, you know, talk to probably less than 5 % of the applications building on the network. This is a global decentralized permissionless network that anyone can build on and thousands of people do build on. But you know, our role is to do things like make big bets and fund things like fire dancer and new validator clients and make sure that the open source tooling that people are building is something that they can actually afford to build. And that's kind of the grant giving component is a major function of what the Solana Foundation does. There's also Solana Labs, which is sort of you can think of it as similar to the world consensus plays in the Ethereum ecosystem. They build products and services on the network. There's sort of a profit motivation behind what they do. And you know, there's about five different core contributor teams at this point, all building software and services to keep the Solana network running. And then, of course, it's run by thousands of individuals all around the world. Yeah, that's incredible. And you're also no stranger to podcasting. You've got a great podcast of your own called The Validated Pod. Tell us a little bit about that and what kind of guests you have on and kind of what your goal is there.
Bloomberg Businessweek
Fresh update on "austin" discussed on Bloomberg Businessweek
"For economic, environmental and social advancement. let's So get to it with a voice who knows about the company's social responsibility initiatives. Here with us is Rose Stuckey -Kirk, chief corporate social responsibility officer at Verizon on Zoom from Austin, Texas. nice Rose, to have you here with Molly and myself on Bloomberg Business Week. What exactly does corporate social responsibility mean to Verizon in terms of goals specific initiatives and how does it enhance the long term of viability the company? Yeah, well, first of all, hello to you both and thank you for having me. You know, Verizon set out about 10 years ago to create a plan for social, economic and environmental advancement. And it was all about how do we use Verizon's asset that can accrue revenue to also do amazing things in society to create economic prosperity for all. do And that we across the dimension of digital inclusion, climate protection and human prosperity. So, Rose, I wanted to bring in or to mention that one of our colleagues recently wrote A Bloomberg big take on how corporate America has made a lot of promises to hire more people of about the idea of color and they actually did it. And this must be an area of focus for you and Verizon underrepresented people. people. So tell us, how has the diversity composition at your company changed following the murder of George Floyd and this renewed focus on race in corporate America? So for George Floyd? What was murdered? We have always been focused on diversity and inclusion. Verizon has one of the most diverse board of directors in the country. In addition to that, we have a diverse leadership team. We have huge commitments that we have made since the beginning of times when you think about how we run our business. So I just want to be very clear that for us, it wasn't as though we had to go and make commitments. We have just continued to live the values that have always been in place at our company and continue to ensure that we have leadership from the top down throughout our company. We have 125 ,000 employees around the globe that reflects our society and the customers that we serve. How did any of it though change, to be fair Rose, because of what happened to George Floyd? You guys have had initiatives in place and have been doing it, but I do think it made everybody a little more bit heightened, if you will, even for those that were You know, I think for those who suddenly realized that we had a race issue in our country, it certainly made them enlightened. For a company like Verizon who has recognized that there are disparities that exist, there are systemic issues that exist, we recognize that the commitments that we aid have to continue no matter what the climate, the social climate, the political climate, we have to remain committed to what I do every day in corporate social responsibility, which is to think about how do we lift people into economic prosperity? How do we address issues in education, issues with small businesses, issues with making sure that people the have skills that they need to compete for the digital jobs of the future? We just believe that we have to stay true to those values no matter what the issues are that we are facing in society and the $3 billion commitment that we have put into digital equity over the past several years and the work that I oversee at enabling that is a perfect example of that commitment. So tell us about that investment. How does that money get spent and I'm sure there must be some kind of accountability on yourself to make sure that it's actually being spent in a way that accomplishes those goals? Yeah, absolutely. So with our digital inclusion work, think about it across four components. How do we do the right work in terms of building out networks and making sure that there is accessibility for all? How do we ensure that people know how to apply the activity that we provide for better healthcare, better education outcomes, better job outcomes? How do we do affordability and ensure that we are providing solutions that are cost effective for individuals? And then how do we do advocacy within our federal government and our state governments to ensure that we have the right policies and procedures that are in place? So when we think about... I'm sorry. No, no, no, please finish. So when we think about our investment in digital inclusion, it's across those four dimensions. So the programs that we have in place like Verizon Innovative Learning in which we are adopting underserved middle schools across the state and giving them for free connectivity, data plans, lesson plans, 5G in their schools, building out 5G labs, unpacking more than three, almost three million students to date with the target of 10 million by 2030. Those are the types of programs that we have in place that we measure the outcomes that we're spending money on, that we are seeing the long -term implication that has on students learning and how it's changing their trajectory on the types of careers that they want. The program's 10 years old and so we can see students who started in middle school who are now out of college who have pursued careers because of the intervention that we made. So our spin and our accountability is around making sure that we're building out the network in areas that we are ensuring that people can afford it, that people can learn and apply and they can be a part of the programs that we have in place that enables them to put connectivity into place and in their lives. Rose, you have front a row seat to all of this you guys at Verizon. What do you think is the biggest obstacle when it comes to or continues to kind of fuel the digital divide? Is it just building out the infrastructure component of it? Is it the component? What is it? You know, I think it's making sure that we are not only building out the infrastructure and removing any barriers, whether they are federal barriers or state barriers that are in place to do but that we're also making sure people know how to use the technology. The important thing for us is that 5G is only important if people understand how to utilize it to solve some of the big problems that we have to use it so that folks have access to connectivity for health care as shared I just or for education purposes. So I think a part of the divide isn't just that you don't have mentioned. You have to also address the divide issues in terms of application. It cannot exist in a space of if you build it, they will come.
Real Estate Coaching Radio
A highlight from Real Estate Market (Crashing)? Price Reduction Scripts & Systems
"Welcome to Real Estate Coaching Radio, starring award -winning real estate coaches and number one international bestselling authors, Tim and Julie Harris. This is the number one daily radio show for realtors looking for a no BS, authentic, real time coaching experience. What's really working in today's market, how to generate more leads, make more money, and have more time for what you love in your life. And now your hosts, Tim and Julie Harris. And we are back. Now we're going to be really drilling down over the next five podcasts on pricing listings to sell, but also getting price reductions. There's a lot of technique to the things we're going to be sharing with you guys. A lot of scripts, a lot of systems. It's very important that you use the notes that are below. Obviously we try to, I think almost always put all of our notes, right Julie? In the show description below. So scroll down, all the notes are there and we're going to be really getting into the weeds with all of you so that frankly you can start pricing your listings to sell. If you have listings now that are overpriced, then you can get them repositioned on the market so they correctly reflect the market's expectations. That was a script. Did you write it down? Snuck that in on them, didn't you? I did. And when your hunting expires, as all of you will be doing, you're also going to be knowing how to get the prices adjusted accordingly so the properties will sell. So this week is very intense, really focused on pricing properties to sell because it is going to become very, very tricky in many markets. Now I'm going to start out with a little bit of, we need to I think have a common understanding of the difference between value and price. And I'm reading your notes and I see what you're about to talk about so I think this will fit in perfectly. It's a good intro. Right. Well, we'll see. Back to you. Yeah, exactly. So I was thinking about this last night, how to explain. So Julie and I, when we socialize with people and go to parties and just talk with all of you guys, just run across everyone. People make the mistake constantly of saying there's some sort of or alluding to or believing that there's some sort of big price or value erosion that's going on. Value erosion, not price erosion. Value versus price. That's where I'm going with all this. Because back in 2007, 8, and 9, there was value erosion. The values of the properties actually dropped below what people paid for them. So there's a difference between pricing and value. So get this clear in your head and then I think it'll give your mind room to be open to the thoughts that we're going to be sharing with you in a second. So if you have, like I'll give you an example, Julie and I had, let's say if we had a car for sale and let's say we put the car for sale for 50 grand and even though the market tells us that the car is worth 30 grand, like every single comp, every single thing that's out there is telling us that car is not worth 50, it's worth 30, right? You guys with me so far? And then we eventually, in order to get the car sold, we have to adjust the price down to 30. Did we lose 20 grand or did we just finally price the house correctly? Do you guys get the difference? And so what a lot of people are believing is because they have to price their properties correctly that the properties have lost value. No, they didn't. They lost value maybe in your head, right? They didn't actually lose value. The difference between, so for example, if we'd bought that car for 30 grand, let's say, and we were selling it for 15 grand, then yeah, we lost 15 grand. That's like what was happening in 2007, 2008, 2009, well, mostly seven and eight. The definition of a short sale, you're selling it for less than you owe. Well short sale, you're selling it for less than you owe, or exactly, assuming you owe like you just said. So yeah, so that's the whole moral of the story here. So please don't think this is anything like the previous market, which I'm teeing you up perfectly. Exactly. As we have said, pricing is the hot topic all week because it's a big hairy topic. We'll take a look at the factors causing price reductions, what to do from a listing agent's perspective, as well as what to do when you're representing a buyer. And we're going to dive into some price reduction scripts and give you the confidence you need to navigate the changing market. So let's first take a look at what's happening to prices right now. And no, by saying that, we are not talking about the market crashing. Just as Tim said, the market is not crashing, it is simply normalizing. So here are the facts, hot off the presses. Nationwide, one in every 15 listings had a price reduction in the past 30 days. That's about six and a half of active list, six and a half percent of active listings in the country. However, some markets have seen 50 % of active listings get a price reduction in the past 30 days. So let's compare those two. Nationwide, it averages out to six and a half percent of actives got a price reduction last month. But there are many markets that it's quite a bit more severe. But so what this is, when you see this kind of statistic, we've seen this before. Julie and I have been doing this for decades. And what this is kind of a, I don't even want to, I don't want to be overly critical, but this is essentially sellers who have unrealistic expectations as far as what their homes are worth. We call it aspirational pricing. And frankly, this is evidence of agents that don't know how to actually properly price properties. In other words, they're just taking the listing at an elevated price. Maybe they don't know how to go about setting the price correctly in the first place, or maybe they don't want to, they don't have the skill set being blunt to get the property priced correctly in the first place. So when you see these kinds of widespread statistics and especially something like 6%, which is a pretty meaningful number, honestly, when you see numbers like that, that is essentially the market still adjusting to the new reality. That's the sellers adjusting to the new reality. And that's also the agents having to learn how to adjust to the new reality. And then, you know, doctor filling their sellers, you know, learning how to write exactly this, this type of information. When you see these types of statistics, this is 100 % proof that the market is still very much adjusting. Now, also taking the time, you know, take when you're considering all this, what time of year it is, what's the, you know, what's interest rates are doing. And so these types of things in a cyclically adjusting market, the numbers will go up and down pretty radically pretty fast. So just adjust accordingly. This information is as of two days ago. That's right. Now, the five metro areas with the highest percentage of listings that got price cuts, this is the percentage of listings that had a price reduction. When I give you these stats, these percentages, that doesn't mean they're coming down by that percent. That's just the percent of overall actives that had to have a price reduction. So that's Wenatchee, Washington State, Idaho Falls, Idaho, Carson City, Nevada, and Austin, Round Rock area, and Waco, Texas. Those were all in the 50 to 54 percent of active listings came down. Again, that doesn't mean they came down by 50 percent. It just means half of the actives had a price reduction. Now she took that sort of sampling because obviously price reductions were happening all over the country, but she was using that to show the fact that it's happening in these completely different unrelated markets. That's right. So unlike before, you know, when the market was super hot for several years, kind of the whole country moved about the same way. We were all going rapidly up in price. We all had multiple offers basically on anything. All it had to do was be available. Well, now we're seeing markets kind of stretch apart, and what's happening in the ones I just rattled off is different than, say, Florida, which still is pretty strong. So you have to know your actual market. Now, this is all happening, all these price reductions are all happening at the same time that prices are still up by at least 3 percent this year and are expected to end up averaging about 5 percent higher by year's end. This figure shows you that we are normalizing, not crashing. A crash would not have price increases. Okay, so that's worth, we really need to drill down on that. So listen to what Julie just said, be very, very clear in your head. There were no price increases, there were no value increases that were happening, it was value basically, that were happening during 2007, 2008, quite the opposite, right? Properties in some markets dropped by, you know, 40 plus percent. That is not what we're experiencing. Year over year, what Julie just explained to all of you guys, is that in many markets prices went up, values of properties went up by at least 5 percent. So despite what the headlines and all the click -baity things on all the news channels and all the rest of it are leading you to believe about real estate, guess what? If you own a home, it went up by probably at least 5 percent this year. Exactly. Okay, now, remember, again, we're proving the point that we are adjusting and normalizing, not crashing. Remember this, at $52 trillion, the total value of homes in the U .S. is up, get this, 49 percent since before the pandemic. That truly is insane. Yes, 49 percent. So these price adjustments won't be catastrophic to most sellers. We're a very long way away from short sales, so don't go thinking the sky is falling. Okay, so again, worth drilling down. Prices are up by almost 50 percent in the last... It's since 2019. Now what you're seeing now with the price adjustments or the price reductions essentially that many markets are now experiencing, remember that you still had 5 percent increase in value in the last 12 months. So you're looking at properties in many markets that have increased by at least 50 percent since 2019? Yeah, since pre -pandemic. Okay, so that is a substantial massive increase. Now, the value of those properties, there's no reason to believe, and it's incredibly important you're really clear in your head about this, that the values of the homes are going to somehow regress back into say 2019 values. And I read that sometimes from people that are, I don't want to come off overly negative, but they really piss me off because they don't use any real factual information. No, they're only using their thought that, well, you know, prices were going really high in and 2006 5, and so then there was a crash, and since prices have gone up, there must be a crash. That's not based on any underlying factors. It's just basically, well, that's what it did before, that's what it's going to do now. It's basically yo -yo thinking about, you know, there's going to be another bubble that's going to burst. There's no reason to believe that's true. The same people who've been predicting that since, again, 2019, they've been wrong year after year after year after year, and they're going to continue to be wrong because nothing is the same as it was back in 2007. Well, that's why we're facting them, right? Okay, so look at the runway, though. Okay, so a 49 % increase since pre -pandemic, and you know, the average, and not every single listing is having a price reduction, but when they do, they're still only coming down by less than 5 % on average, so you've got that remaining, you know, 44 % left to go before you're even Steven with 2019. There's just so much runway there. Now, are there isolated instances where people refinanced, took a bunch of equity out, didn't have a very big down payment in the first place, and maybe are behind on payment, and that makes them even very, very, very randomly, literally less than, I think it's like 3 .5 % of the market of closings were even short sales. So along those lines, again, you'll have this memorized because that is what you do. Possibly. We'll see. No, she will. You watch, listeners. So what percent of all home inventory is distressed? almost It's like 4%, but it's less than 4 % overall. Which is a record low for what period of time? Forever. Yeah. Literally forever. It is a record low since they started recording it, I think back in the 80s. You remember when all the - And actually, it's gone down. It was a previous low, and it's actually gotten lower in the past quarter. Remember when all the naysayers were saying, well, when the COVID - Forbearances. Forbearances. There was going to be a foreclosure wave. There's one thing after another, after another, after another. Okay. So the forbearance naysayers, there's going to be this awful backup of foreclosures due to forbearances. Well, they also said there would be a silver tsunami when all the baby boomers just had to sell their houses all of a sudden. And they also thought there would be an Airbnb bust. And now the new thing is, as soon as somebody has to make their student loan payments, well, that means they're going to miss their mortgage payments from one drama to the next, but not based on facts, which we like to sprinkle upon you. Again, the reason that we're so adamant about you guys getting these facts and the reason that we spend so much time on this podcast and our coaching program to make sure you have the actual information is because if you operate with bad information, you're going to then pass that bad information along to your customers. You're then going to, you know, it always comes down to the same thing. If you don't believe that tomorrow is going to be better than today, you're not going to take the actions today that would have made tomorrow better than today. In other words, if you believe the sky is falling, you're sure as hell not going to do what you don't want to do when you don't want to do at the highest level, you're not going to learn to price properties correctly. You're not going to learn how to get prices, you know, lower prices on homes. Why would you bother after all tomorrow? It's going to be, you know, some sort of, you know, locust apocalypse, so you're never actually going to make tomorrow better than today. So that's really the reason that you want to purge from your mind all of these naysayers, all of these snake oil salesmen that are trying to sell you into the belief that there's any sort of anything other than frankly, amazing things that are going to happen in the real estate markets. And here's a little foreshadowing, and we're working on a podcast about this. If you look purely at the demographics of what the United States is experiencing over the next 20, 30 years, it's extraordinary and it's going to do nothing but maybe even increase the demand for housing by something like five to seven X. So that's how many home sales and how much new construction is going to have to be built just to meet demand and it's going to be built and that demand will be met and you are going to be a beneficiary of that provided that you are taking the right steps now to, you know, stay relevant in the real estate. That's right. And provided that you make it through this next three to six months because it is going to be more challenging than you're used to. That's why we're talking about price reductions because we've seen, you know, we've gotten texts, we've seen videos online, we've seen stuff on social media where agents were losing their minds over having to do price reductions, hearing about price reductions, having to ask a seller to come down.
Bloomberg Markets
Fresh update on "austin" discussed on Bloomberg Markets
"The possibility about because we're defensive now and we're in t -bills but if the trend changes and all of a sudden things fall off a cliff in terms of stock market things look very bad and you actually see a change in direction of of there yields are going to be that's an amazing opportunity and not just long bonds but in just even conventional bonds like aggregate bonds so we're waiting for that but it's not right now and i don't think you make the trade at this moment do you have to wait for the fed actually to signal rate cuts are coming no i think what you do is you watch trend the of yields and you watch the trend of just the price of these of these bonds that's what we do so we we just really ignore everything else and so that you know typically what you see is the market you know this bond a month before you see any fed newman or you hit actual peak rates you start to see a change in direction of those bonds watch so the price of of these bonds more than anything else so in terms of you know i guess you got to wait until you see the whites of its eyes right and that's been the same thing with um any government shutdowns if you think that's going to be horrible for for markets well it doesn't seem to be until things uh go overboard is that do you feel the same way about the broader you know government debt because right now you know 33 trillion and counting um we know entitlements like won't be funded for probably more than another decade does that not to matter markets until we get to you know pass the deadline yeah so that's the most important thing we that think is going on in the markets i'm here in austin texas getting ready to fly out back to new york and yesterday i spoke again a broker at dealer conference and i talked about the hidden implications of global debt so you've got this situation where the lender of last resort right always saves the day and so over and over again we go through these market and crises then and then the fed comes in well we all know the fed over the short term isn't going to come in and save the markets but i think what you have to ask the question is is if you actually tip into a recession if it's a hard landing then you've got the potential for decreased gdp at a time when death of gdp is already high the possibility for increased need fiscal for stimulus which gets you to the point where all of a sudden this all maybe looks and so the giant wave that we're ignoring right now that could be a bonus at some point is the that fact you know just as we saw in the uk last year that was the most i think like poignant data point to look at when treasuries collapsed last year when when all they did guys would they they they passed a bill that decreased taxes and increased spending so who cares about that right normally in the u .s. But but you know if starts up you know if you ever have a situation where you've got to start to have soft auctions for treasuries now i know it sounds like conspiracy crazy stuff but really it's just you're kind of not there and then you all of a sudden are but if you get to the point where is that a hundred percent of gdp year under ten and twenty hundred and thirty that's the big question is like what do you do with this lender of last resort resort all of a sudden not being an effective tool anymore that no one really talks about that no one thinks about but that that's if you look out five or ten years from now i think we'll look back and say wow what were we thinking of we we were or you know that this is dwarfs the mortgage crisis dwarfs it hey we're gonna leave you right there phil taves thanks so much for joining us as always uh phil taves ceo of taves asset 85 management of their portfolio uh in t bills t bills not even like like notes or t bonds t bills so ultimate short term there uh that is a cautious portfolio that's almost like a uh doomsday portfolio but i appreciate getting his thoughts as well um so what's your takeaway from two days in ohio well i mean the uh everything in ohio seems to be the same as everything in washington just kind of like teetering right right the economy is doing well people have jobs there's inventory at dealerships but um everyone's a little bit worried you know yeah all right no one's quitting um the dealers want to see an end to the strike and uh you know i think people are getting more and more cautious um which which i i feel like is why you know they're loading up on tlt e yep and selling stocks all right with our news in new york city here's michael well matt thank you very much what is next now on capitol hill house speaker kevin mccarthy was ousted after eight members of the republican majority voted with all 208 democrats present in supporting the motion put forward by florida republican matt gates after mccarthy worked with democrats to avoid the government shutdown mccarthy says he's leaving the speaker's office with his head held high i do not regret negotiating our government is designed to find compromise i don't regret my efforts to build coalitions and find solutions i was raised to solve does not create them meanwhile congressman jim jordan of ohio confirms he's running for house speaker former president
Unchained
A highlight from The Chopping Block: Which DeFi Metrics Are Still Useful in a Bear Market? - Ep. 550
"Token economics can do way less than the industry on the whole has claimed that it's able to do and so for the most part I Sort of consider token economics to be a little bit of a dirty word today compared to how I saw it two years ago It's a tale of two fun. Now. Your losses are on someone else's balance generally speaking aircrafts are kind of pointless Anyways, I'm into trading firms who are very involved DeFi protocols are the antidote to this problem Hello everybody Welcome to the chopping block every couple weeks the four of us get together and give the industry insiders perspective on the crypto topics of the day So quick intros first we got Tom the DeFi Maven and master of beams Next we got Robert the crypto connoisseur and czar of superstate then we've got to ruin the giga brain and grand poobah at gauntlet And finally, I'm a seed that had high mana dragonfly So we're early stage investors in crypto But I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice legal advice or even life advice Please see chopping blocks at XYZ for more disclosures Alright, so it's been a crazy couple weeks. There's been a lot of conferencing going on I think most of us minus Robert were at token 2049 in Asia I guess Tom and to ruin you guys are back in the States. There was also main net in New York What's been the vibe? Give me give me the brain dump of what conferencing has felt like in the last few weeks The u .s. Is dead as a doorknob for crypto It seemed like the u .s. Conferences had less attendance than they normally do amongst other things Whereas the Asia conferences were crazy like I just didn't think there were 12 ,000 people who wanted to go to a crypto conference in 2023 and clearly there was much more in Singapore Singapore was insane Yeah, I think token 2049 had more people than East Denver. Like it was it was pretty wild I mean it is like the premier event in Asia and it's sold out. Yeah It was gigantic venue, right? One of the I mean obviously if Denver was a very large venue as well, but it was it was it was absolutely massive Robert you were at permissionless. How did permissionless feel? I mean compared to prior years permissionless Felt, you know pretty quiet really high quality group of people, you know The conference goers that were showing up to a conference in Austin, Texas during a relatively hot week in September We're not totally like broad retail audiences. Most of people that were closer to industry closer to Happening in this space and a little bit more informed than you know, I've seen elsewhere so Small like token 2049 pulled a lot of people last -minute from permissionless I think a lot of people were planning to go and then decided like oh shit This seems like there's so much happening in Asia. I gotta I gotta go out there So I think the timing was a little unfortunate for permissionless, but there was a clip of Eric Voorhees Giving I guess what was like the keynote. It was pretty amazing. If you haven't seen it, I would strongly recommend watching it It's got like a couple million views or something and it's essentially just like a rallying cry Just sort of a credo of hey, you know screw the government Like we're trying to build a decentralized alternative financial system and it really kind of plucked to the heartstrings I don't know. Do you see that live? I did not see that live I actually had to take off right before that speech, but I was able to watch it online afterwards It reminded me a little bit of a his debate with SPF. I think like a year ago It was almost like it was like a month right before FTX collapsed and it was similarly kind of getting back to kind of the core Religion ethos of crypto is very we gotta get him on the show at some point He's definitely he's a very good bear market in a bull market I always feel like Eric is a little too centered and like too grounded bull markets They kind of demand a bit more craziness and levity but in a bear market I feel like he's got this gravity that is very clarifying You know, I really I really appreciate the role that he's come to play as like the elder statesman of the industry Any other takeaways from token 2049? I mean we were out in Asia for a couple weeks the videos have just started going up for token 2049 and I did one panel that I moderated with a bunch of l1s and It was actually probably the most entertaining panel I did I did I did several panels while I was out there But most of them were you know, they were great but this one we had it was Aptos we Avalanche and near all of whom were on stage and Goon who's been on the show a couple times Goon was just like he just basically was ready to pick a fight and so they just got on say they were scrapping they were like interrupting each other and getting super aggressive and It was honestly the most entertaining panel. I think I've ever moderated just from how angry everyone was on stage So any other any other highlights or anything that stood out to you guys while you were giving talks or or moderating? How about being on stage but I'll say there was a bit of a bizarro world moment with them token for 2049 too Where obviously a lot of high quality projects a lot of good representation throughout the industry and then there were a lot of random products I'd never heard of that had these like massive, you know Sort of neon lit up boots that they clearly spent a bunch of money on I believe Islamic coin was one of the large sponsors I am a not an Islamic coin expert, but there was another sort of meme floating around They're doing a public crowd sale for Islamic coin at reportedly a 30 billion dollar f .d .v I think it's like 60 million dollars raise a million dollars wait, so it's Yes, but they went on on Twitter to explain that this is a 100 year f .d .v And so in reality the the near -term f .d .v. They're nothing into is not near -term f .d .v So, um, you're the more than the near -term market cap I think we need we add we need to add some extra f .d .v Numbers in into coin gecko just so we can start the near -term f .d .v long -term f .d .v You know, I think an interesting thing related to this That's a tiny deviation but important to note is the history of finance Actually has had a lot of things where the introduction of a new met financial metric as a form of reporting Completely changes company structure like EBITDA, right? like why does EBITDA exists like earnings before income tax depreciation depreciation amortization and it's like Because it was this some company that was losing money and they started reporting EBITDA instead of like true profits But that kept them afloat for long enough to raise financing and then EBITDA now became like the accounting standard over time Right, so I kind of think that these f .d .v games We're gonna just see this like war of all these metrics and whichever metric is like the market wants will eventually be the standard and everyone Will just try to optimize that. Yeah, this is 100 % what happened to TVL Yeah TVL in principle makes sense as a number right, but how do you count TVL? Do you count your own token? Do you count wrap versions of your token if somebody wraps your token and puts it back in your protocol? Is that double the TVL like, you know? DeFi llama just decided how TVL gets counted and then the rest of the world just warped around the way that you know These metrics decided to get reported and you of course you saw that on Solana where like all these people were recursively Kind of putting TVL from one protocol back in another one back in another one Now I think we've gotten better at not double counting triple counting But you know back in in 2021 when DeFi was in full thrust It was just whatever goes like that's TVL the other chart crime that exists is that I really irks me is when people show cumulative charts instead of like instantaneous charts it I just like kills me I Will say as a VC let this be like a little one -on -one lesson as a VC. We absolutely hate cumulative charts We understand that cumulative charts look good So for those who don't understand a cumulative chart normally when you have a chart you look at look Here are the number of transactions every day, right? cumulative chart is here is the total number of Transaction volume ever if you add it all together and the nice thing about cumulative charts is that they look like they're going up Into the right always no matter what because they're adding, you know It's like the number of how many trades have been acting positive number. Yeah, exactly The problem is that it is useless to look at as a VC We as a VC and you look at a cumulative chart What I assume is that your actual chart looks like dogshit and that's why you're showing the accumulative chart So in general don't show cumulative chart. However, if it's a chart with multiple dimensions shown if it's a cumulative chart and a daily or time period flow Together then it's cool. Is it? You know, I'm already doing the first derivative Okay, let's say let's say you have a daily chart and it's like net inflows We're like some days are positive. Some days are negative. Some days are positive. Some days are negative You don't know the total you find that that's a net chart not a cumulative chart So if you're netting, you know gains and losses and you're getting like P &L or something like that We're net inflows and flows that's not a cumulative chart. That's very different because that does not go up into the right I agree. No, no, I think Then it's well Complimented with a cumulative on the other access behind it. I Net and cumulative are two different things. I did see it. I agree. That's just a U .M. We should have a chart crime episode The truest of VC true crime it was inflows prefer for friend tech, but they didn't take out the outflows So it was literally just any deposits in a friend tech added to the chart And so of course you assume you're gonna be looking at a net chart And in fact, it's any sort of deposit, you know adds to the overall chart, which is kind of a useless metric chart crime chart crime Any other any other chart crimes that come to my lungs are on the topic? I think these like feed accumulated ones where they're like people who are like trying to annualize I think people annualizing certain types of fee accrual and crypto sometimes makes no fucking sense because it's very event driven like oh Like there's a ton of fees from one event and then like zero forever But they always like choose the right time scale so that they can say like we have at least X of fees Like I understand how integrals and derivatives work and you're just trying to play with the boundary conditions Yeah, I mean I saw a lot of this in 2021 when a bunch of people like a bunch of businesses that had a bunch of random core businesses but almost all of them had tokens on the balance sheet and those tokens went up and they counted that as revenue and So they're just like, oh, you know, I had 50 million of revenue this year And if you charge that forward, you know another 50 next year and it's gonna ramp this much I'm like dude your core business made like 3 million and 50 million just came from tokens going up on your balance sheet. Like that's not your business, you know, so that I mean It's kind of charty. I don't know if it's a sharp crime per se but it's like EBITDA, right? Like I think crypto still is so nascent and the idea of like what should count and what shouldn't and what flows are it's still Kind of an open thing of like what the accounting should be, right? So I kind of think I'm kind of curious what EBITDA like the thing that becomes a like meme that sticks That's not TVL and that that's not just like fees What do you think you guys think it is because I do feel like this bear market My prediction is this bear market will end when we have invented what that is like the last bear market ended when TVL started becoming a metric and then people started monitoring it and like not gaming it as much and It was just kind of going up slowly. I feel like the Solana stuff came to even more where it was like, oh Here's the metric that everything's measured on So what if we come up with these crazy ways to like that's usually the end of a bubble, right? Like like once when it goes not the creation of a little baby That was like that was like the kickoff of the book I know I don't know but my point is like once you start getting kind of a shelling point around a particular metric It doesn't get gamed for a little while Like there's like a certain amount of time where it like it becomes a good real standard bearer But then someone eventually realizes that it's the thing to game and then you get this like kind of capital bubble around that So like AI you're having that happen with tokens per second right now Which is also a fucking useless meaningless thing because like the choice of architecture means the tokens aren't really the same There's not fungibility of them. Sure. I think it feels like right now There's a more and more fixation on revenue. And so you're seeing like, you know token terminal if you're looking at there's just revenue There's annualized revenue. There's price to sales price to earnings. So it does feel like we're sort of Morphing more closer to traditional revenue and underwriting metrics, which is a good sign However, these metrics aren't totally normalized in the sense that you know, for example for Uniswap Does Uniswap have revenue like obviously the token holders aren't capturing anything so the revenue is flowing entirely to You could say like cost of goods sold is like 100 % because all the revenue is going to the liquidity providers I would say, you know One of the biggest issues is that you have like protocols that are not businesses and people are trying to strap like business metrics or accounting metrics on them and they're just not like Ethereum Bitcoin like people are like, oh like, you know fees paid like is that revenue? No, it's not revenue, right? Like I don't think anyone thinks that like the transaction fees on Bitcoin or revenue. Are they on a theorem? No, but like I've seen platforms that like talk about That alongside something like Uniswap and it's like none of these really makes sense It's just like someone trying to build not to knock anyone particular company But someone trying to build a company about standardizing data is like, oh great Let's like standardize how we look at everything and I don't think it fits personally I don't think these protocols living on top of blockchains are necessarily businesses or need business metrics. I don't think it's that helpful I think like projects and For success like how many people are you know doing X Y & Z and like it won't always translate to the thing What do you think are metrics that should be adopted in lieu of? You know revenue or price of sales or whatever all the stuff that people are doing to try to account for You know particularly in defy I think for layer ones. It's a little more nebulous I think it comes down to exactly like what the protocol is, right? So like a great example is even taking two things that like seem like there's the same Let's say like Uniswap first like synthetics Well, both of them are for trading like, you know, one of them, you know is for trading spot tokens And one of them is more like derivatives, right? So like would you say like total notional traded like that might look crazy, you know to use that as comparison like I guess my point is like even two things that look the same are gonna be vastly different when you think about how you judge them or measure them and so All I'm trying to say is like, you know, let's slow down and not trying to come up with one size fits all metrics I don't think there is some like EBIT type But they will love defy broadly it trying and and when people get any shelling point on one of those That's when you see capital formation happen because it's like hey look there's this metric we can optimize it we see the growth curve right like growth implies you have a number or a set of numbers and a derivative like a gradient and The gradient can go up and you're like, yes or more money in it and I do feel like there's like a Psychological human behavior element to this and crypto somehow plays with that in a lot of ways and that that's some of its beauty Is that the fact that it kind of plays with these I think the revenue thing also is like a good I agree like it's really difficult to sort of compare across different types of companies, but generally it's a good heuristic for Understanding like product market fit and desirability just showing willingness to pay right like you can't fudge it because I'm literally burning money I'm spending money to use this this protocol saying something with like, you know net dollar retention at revenue retention overall It's like user retention Like yeah like it I think that's generally sort of a good heuristic because it's showing that if people are actually using these things consistently because they want to use it not because ideally you sort of you're tying out the I'm inclined to agree with this is that although it is an abuse of nomenclature I think you're better off thinking of protocols as products and thinking about like if you can just applying very kind of dumb Simplistic like yeah, they don't work perfectly, but they're way better than just like finger in the air What's TVL and kind of how do I feel like the vibes are trending for this particular protocol? I think it at the very least it keeps you honest if you look at the era Pre when people had concrete metrics that they were looking at like protocol revenue and things like that There were just a lot of things that had you know, take for example, then you have and you had 4chan economics Whatever was posted on 4chan was the truth totally totally and also like not looking at like net of emissions Looking at like willingness to pay net of emissions Like you just end up with this crazy town where it's like Oh, there's basically like a negative cycle where people are making money by using your product You're like, wow, I've parked my good fit There was basically an entire year where every hot product in crypto was that it was people it was being like wow Look how much adoption this is getting when it's really just people clicking a button that pays them every second to be very fair That is it's like it's so funny enterprise SAS bubble also had the same thing It was just the way the capital is distributed.
Evangelism on SermonAudio
Fresh update on "austin" discussed on Evangelism on SermonAudio
"So we're going, okay, it's Q &A time. This is going to get fun. And so another guy raises his hand, and he says, Dr. Austin. He goes, does the Bible say that homosexuality is an abomination? Well, Dr. Austin's a geologist. If you've met Dr. Austin, he's thinking rocks, right? He's thinking about rocks, and so he was kind of caught off guard a little bit, but he went, uh, yeah, the Bible says that homosexuality is an abomination. And then all of a sudden everybody in the audience, starting to grumble, right? Hey, Dr. Austin, my dad used to be a pastor of a church, and he ran off with the organist, Dr. Austin. What do you think about that? And then another guy raised his hand, and he went, I knew this guy that like stole all the money from the church that we went to. And so as a young man sitting in that room, I realized what was going on. And I wanted to say, hey, time out. You guys don't want to talk about science. You guys just need a hug. For reals. All of them had owies on their heart where somebody, either through hypocrisy or something in a bad church setting or something, isn't the enemy so good at doing those things? They all had owies on their heart. And these were the greatest atheist minds in the world at this conference. And I learned something. I learned that when I meet somebody and I want to do evangelism, a lot of times if I just listen to them, it only takes about two to three minutes for them to reveal what their owie is. Isn't that amazing? If I just listen, they'll tell me what the, once they know you're a Christian, they'll tell you what their owie is. Oh, my dad used to beat me or something like that, right? And now you know what can happen? Is now that you've prayed, you've started talking to them and they've revealed their owie to you, now you can apply the gospel to their owie. You can bring them truth with it. And so really it focuses on the heart issue, right? Is you want to focus on the heart issue. So that's coming from the creation guy who loves creation science. You know a lot of times all of the creation issues are just smoke screens. And sometimes you've just got to shoot down the smoke screens to get to the heart issue. And you know what? What changes people's lives? Is it my clever stories and all of that kind of stuff? It's the gospel, right? For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes the Jew first and also to the Greek. So I was trying to think about what things are important. Now listen, this is not the absolute truth of what, this is just my opinion. As I've been sharing with people, I think that a lot of you hopefully would agree these are some important points to communicate, right? God created the world perfect. Man rebelled in the curse of sin. The wages of sin is death. Christ paid for our sin. We must individually repent and confess Him as Savior. His righteousness is imputed to us as His children will spend eternity with God. Those are things that I hope that I can share with somebody and hopefully using the scriptures, right? Because it's the gospel that has the power to change lives. You know, for a long time I was doing door-to-door witnessing with my friend Scott in San Diego, California when I worked at the Institute for Creation Research. And we would just knock on doors and we would just share the gospel with people. And if you've been out there doing this, you know how that goes a lot of times. Usually you get fa-pow, right? Or else they've got to do something or they don't have time for you or they're just freaked out that you're at their door, especially nowadays, right? But every once in a while we would get to talk and every once in a while somebody would invite us in and on rare occasions people would even come to know the Lord and then we would get to point them to a church somewhere where they could start going to church. So anyway, with me and Scott, we had kind of a little bit of a disagreement going on. And Scott said to me, Pat, for the guys that slammed the door, let's go back next week and all we've got to do is just help them to see the importance of this and see that they like us and pretty soon we'll start to be friends with them and then pretty soon we'll be able to share the gospel. And I said, Scott, I don't think that that's the way it works. I think the way it is is that we spread the seed and then God decides when the seed is going to plant. It's not that we have to convince people to be. As a matter of fact, I've heard this from a lot of Christians is let's make sure that we're cool Christians so that when they see how cool we are, they'll want to be cool like us and then they'll want to be cool Christians too. No, I think God has given different hearts to different people and they're in different places. And our job is just to share the seed. Let's turn to the scriptures real quick. I know you guys know this already, but I thought this is a great scripture to read.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
A highlight from A Dame Trade Deep Dive With Ben Thompson, Plus Seth Meyers and Million-Dollar Picks
"Coming up, Dame gets traded. Million dollar pick Seth Meyers, it's all next. It's the Bill Simmons Podcast presented by FanDuel. Get in on the football action right from the opening kickoff with America's number one sports book. The app is safe, secure, easy to use. FanDuel always has exclusive offers. When you win, you'll get paid instantly. FanDuel has lots of ways to play, like the spread, money line, over -unders, team totals, player props, so much more. Jump into the action at any time during the game with live betting. Combine multiple bets from the same game in a same game parlay. Download the FanDuel sports book app today. Make every moment more of this football season. The Ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit TheRinger .com slash RG to learn more about the resources and help lines available and listen to the end of this episode for additional details. You must be 21 plus and present in select states. Gambling problem, call 1 -800 -GAMBLER or visit TheRinger .com slash RG. This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. I just use this. Here's something every football fan should know. You can get everything you need for game day delivered with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything because you can't get the dream flex for your fantasy team delivered with Uber Eats. But Tex -Mex, yeah, great pass protection, can't get it. Great pizza selection, oh yeah. While they can't help on the field, you can get pretty much everything else you need to watch the game delivered with Uber Eats. So this season, get anything, almost, almost anything for game day by ordering on the Uber Eats app. Uber Eats, official on -demand delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. I'll call in select markets and 21 plus to order. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details. We're also brought to you by The Ringer Podcast Network where I put up a new rewatchables on Monday night. We did the big chill. It was very, very exciting. I have Kyle Brandt coming on Monday's podcast. I'm just gonna tell you the movie now because it is gonna be the best moment of your weekend if you spent two hours watching this classic. We're doing Toy Soldiers. It really brings everything possible to the table. So if you wanna watch it ahead of time, there it is. That podcast is going up Monday night. If you wanna hear stuff about the debate, we have Tara Paul and Mary's podcast, Somebody's Gotta Win. That reacted to it as well as the press box with Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker. So there you go. Our debate coverage has been on point. Also, higher learning. Van and Rachel had Larry Elder on this weekend. It made a lot of noise, man. That podcast is great. I hope you check that out as well. Hope you're checking out theringer .com. And on this podcast, gonna talk about the dame trade at the top. We're gonna bring in Ben Thompson from the Techery newsletter, which he's been on this podcast I think four weeks ago. And he's a huge Bucks fan. He's gonna give the Bucks fan side of things. We're gonna do million dollar picks. And then old friend Seth Meyers talking about a whole bunch of stuff. So really good podcast. It's all next. First, our friends from Pro Jam. What's up? All right, I'm taping this on Thursday afternoon. Normally when there's a big MBA trade, I always do the emergency trade reaction right after the podcast. But we just put up a podcast on Tuesday. So I decided to play it a little differently this time. I wanted a little distance, I wanted to listen to stuff, read stuff, and try to form some big picture opinions coming out of this. So I have four smaller ones, then one big one. First one, I thought Portland did an incredible job with this trade. I really liked this trade, especially everyone was trying to bully them in June and July about, oh, you got to take Miami's offer. You just got to. It's where he wants to go. It's the only offer you're going to get. And guess what? They waited. They played it perfectly. They stared Miami down, and they got a much better deal. First of all, they get the Drew Holiday piece that they can flip into a bunch out of their stuff, which we'll talk about in one second. I love the DeAndre Ayton gamble. As you know, on this podcast, I am a big DeAndre Ayton guy. Not in the sense of I'm the biggest fan of his in the world, but I'm a fan of the asset. I just think I love the valued assets, no matter what it is. Whatever market we're talking about, DeAndre Ayton, 18 and 10 for his career, 60 % field goals percentage, 25 years old. He's played in 45 playoff games. He played four rounds in the 2021 finals. Last year, he got his ass kicked by Jokic. Oh, sorry. Like, that never happens. And Phoenix just sold on him, which I can't wait to talk about. But just from a Portland standpoint, they not only get Ayton in whatever they get for holiday, they get the 29 first, they get the two swaps, and they dump Nurkic. Nurkic hasn't had a healthy start to finish all the way through the playoffs here since 2018, which I'm positive was a long time ago. He's basically 12 and 8. He's, you know, a 50 % shooter. I made a list of the top 30 centers. I encourage you to do this at home, because what's more fun than making lists of NBA centers? I can't imagine anything. I made a list of who I thought were the best assets of the center position for talent, contract, everything. He was 29th on my list. The only person I had ahead of him who's technically a starter, unless you start talking about the Detroit or Charlotte guys, was Zubats on the Clippers. I thought he was the 29th best center asset in the league. And Phoenix, you know, just quickly to go to them, they're trying to win this year. They got worse. They turned Ayton's money into Nurkic and Grayson Allen and Nasir Little. Grayson Allen, we already know with him, he can't play in playoff series. We saw him 22. We saw it last year. I heard and read in some places like that, I got two rotation players. Did they? Is Nurkic a playoff rotation player? Is Grayson Allen a playoff rotation player? Because I'm positive he's not. So for the same money that they were spending on Ayton, they got three guys that I don't think are going to help them. In 25, the money comes down a little bit to 23 million just for Nurkic and Little, which is 7 million less than Ayton. And then in 26, that money goes up to 25 .5. But I don't understand what Phoenix was doing. Why not wait to see if Ayton clicks with Vogel? Vogel has such a good history with centers. He rejuvenated Dwight Howard on the 2020 Lakers. He basically created Roy Hibbert's career in 2013 with the defense verticality thing. I thought he was going to do a good job with Ayton. I'm stunned that they gave up on him. I'm almost waiting for one of those, now they tell us stories when, you know, that's where Brian Curtis calls them, where like a week after something happens, there's this kind of notebook dump where it's like, here's seven terrible DeAndre Ayton stories. So maybe that'll happen. But for Phoenix just to be like, cool, we locked this down, man. We got Nurkic. You're trying to win the title. You have KD and Booker and Beal. And like, what are you guys doing? Anyway, from Portland's standpoint, I love the Ayton thing. I love that they didn't get bullied. And I know they're going to turn Drew Holliday into something. So this to me was at least an A minus for them, for where they were two months ago, where Dave's like, I want to go to Miami. That's it. And if you don't trade me there, that's kind of fucked up. And they made this work as it got reported that, uh, I think in the athletic, that he expanded his list to Brooklyn and to Milwaukee in the last two weeks. And that's what Portland was waiting on. You know, they were banking on the fact that he's a competitive dude. He's one of the best 75 pairs ever. He wanted a situation settled. So, you know, you wait, you wait, you wait, they expand the list and then you go. Uh, there's a Drew Holliday piece to this. That's awesome. He becomes a contender prize. I wouldn't call this a Drew Holliday sweepstakes. I reserved sweepstakes for the superstars, but it's a mini sweepstakes. This is somebody that could have a huge impact on the playoff race. You know, not only the usual suspects, everybody's talking about Boston, ironically, Miami is a really good fit for him. And in some ways, um, I'm a little more scared of them with Miami than Dame in some ways, especially at a much cheaper contract with giving up less and keeping some of their assets. Philly, if they could pull it off, they have to be in there in Golden State, Minnesota. I think I have to mention Sacramento, I think is a team that if they could figure out how to get Drew without giving up their core, which is basically Keegan Murray and Sabonis and Fox, like that's, you know, could Davion Mitchell be in that trade with some, with a salary and some picks, who knows. The team that I love for Drew Holliday is OKC. I have OKC, you know, I started doing my MBA research for the over -under spot and I haven't landed on a number for them yet, but to me, they feel like a high forties team with Chet and with the growth of their young guys. And if you just like, let's say they traded Lou Dort and a bunch of their picks, maybe two firsts and two of their lesser picks or three firsts and a second, whatever it is. And they just say, fuck it. And they get Drew and you put him with Giddy and SGA and Jalen fucking awesome Williams and Chet Holmgren and all these other dudes they have, that might be a top three team in the West. I mean, that, that's starting to give me some early 2010s OKC vibes. So where he goes is going to be important. I just feel like there was so much Drew Holliday slander the last couple of days. You know, he's one of my favorite players. Even Haralabob, who was the chairman of the board of the Drew Holliday fan club for years and would have the benefit dinners there and, you know, just did a lot of yeoman's work on that front. And even he was like, yeah, yeah, Dame's better than Drew. That trade makes sense for Milwaukee. I was hurt, Haralabob. I was 100 % hurt by that. But you know, Drew got his ass kicked by Jimmy Butler in the playoffs last year. I get it. It happens. Jimmy was unbelievable. I feel like he would have kicked anybody's ass. By the way, why is Drew Holliday guarding Jimmy Butler? That speaks more to some of the issues with Milwaukee. He was never supposed to be a point guard and a creator. I think he was always better as an off -the -ball guy. We saw that with Rondo and New Orleans and just in general. I want to see him with a point guard. I want to see him just being unleashed, not having the ball a lot, just worrying about hitting threes, being an occasional, you know, make -shit -happen guy and being like the third or fourth best guy on a team without having the offensive responsibility to have. All their half court issues got blamed on him for the last couple of years. And I get it. They weren't like an awesome half -court team, even the other one in the finals, but I really value that dude. I had him, even I did the trade value list in August and I had him 37th and I had Dame 23rd. I think he's one of the best 30 players in the league still. He's 33 years old, which, you know, I'm going to talk in a second about when guards hit their mid -30s, but just in general, I think he's a real asset. If he goes to a team like the Celtics and they can keep Derek White and Tatum and Brown in the center, it's like, look out, man. So little mini sweepstakes, rarely do we get the trade, but then we still get another asset to talk about. Thank you for everyone involved in the trade. And then the fourth small point is just that, you know, not rocket science, Milwaukee bought some Giannis time here. They have one of the best 20 players of all time. They were staring down the barrel of a situation that was not good. I was talking about it on this podcast in late June and early July. I thought he was going to put them on the clock. I thought Mark Lasry selling his stake was a really bad sign for all of this because that dude is smart. As I laid out in June, that guy is really smart. And if he's feeling like, you know what, it's time for me to sell my buck stock, that makes me nervous. And then all the stuff that Giannis said and did, which I thought he did really fairly and really smartly. And I think that dude's about titles and that's it. And I know we say that about players, but I think in his case, I don't think he cares about, you know, what's my legacy, how do I compare against Dirk DeWhisky, any of that stuff. I just think he wants more rings. I mean, think about the guys who have won two rings out of the best 35 guys on my list of my pyramid. Those are all guys in my top 35 that won multiple wings. You go to the one -ring side, Jerry West, Oscar, Moses, Dirk, Jokic, Giannis, Pettit, Garnett, Kawhi, Rick Barry. That's the list he's on now. I certainly don't think he's looking at that list going, I got to get away from these guys, but it's a slightly different list. I think when you win multiple rings in multiple situations, it elevates you in a certain way. I think he fundamentally understands that at least a little bit. I want to be the best player since LeBron James. I think that's a thing that he wants. How am I going to do that? I need more rings. I need more finals trips. He knew from last year and maybe even the Boston series that they just weren't good enough. Whether this trade is going to be the thing that propels them, we'll find out, but he's been in the league 10 years, two MVPs, five first teams, two second teams, and now we have this little two -year window. Kawhi and the Raptors was a one -year window. This is a two -year window, I feel like. With Giannis, he's got two years left in his deals. So does Lopez. Middleton has two in a player option. Dame's got two, and then this crazy $120 million player option extension thingy that he has that just keeps going and going. It's probably two years. There's a world where this could go terribly this season, at least for what the expectations are, and then maybe it becomes Kawhi, Raptors. Maybe Giannis is like, you know what? That didn't work. Trade me. And the Bucks, who have no picks left and no future, they look at it next summer, and they go, all right. We tried it. Giannis, what can we get for you? Dame, what can we get? And they just do a reboot, rehaul. Remember, they won in 2021, which just takes so much pressure out of this. It's so much different than the Clippers situation, where they went all in on Kawhi and Paul George. They give up all those picks and SGA, and they've gotten nothing out of it. They haven't even made the finals. So it's got to happen. I think they at least probably have to make the finals. If they get bounced in round two, do I think Giannis is going to stay because they made this Dame -Mower trade? Probably not. So that leads to the big question, is how good of a trade was this? So there's a big picture angle on Dame, and it's going to sound negative, but I really don't want it to sound negative because I think Dame, I voted for him for NBA Top 75. I think he's been one of the best guards in the last 15 years. I think there's a ton of great things you can say, and there's a chance that he goes to Milwaukee, and this thing is fucking awesome. I know any Celtic fan I've talked to, including Isaiah, who's helping produce this podcast today, the Giannis -Dame pick and roll is just terrifying. Other than Jokic and Murray, it's going to be the single most unstoppable offensive play in the league. It is. We are conceding that point. The spot Dame is in right now, big picture -wise, it's weird. He's a superstar, but he's not, and we've seen guys like this before. I judge superstars by, do you have the resume statistically, and is your team succeeding consistently at a certain level? You can't totally say that about Dame. He's never been on a 55 -win team. He's missed the playoffs completely four times in 11 years. He said three first -round exits. He made the Final Four once in 2019, which was really lucky because Golden State and Houston were the two best teams, and then they got smoked. He's never been on a true contender ever. Instinctively, you go, well, that's not his fault. Who's he played with? Well, he played with LaMarcus Aldridge and CJ McCollum and a couple other guys, but not really anybody. The reason I'm putting this up is there's a success element that he has not had yet that for somebody with his resume is actually kind of unusual. I went and I looked up how many guards in the history of the league averaged 22 points a game for their career and played at least 700 games. I thought the list would be like 20. I didn't know. I didn't know what I was walking into. Only I think 75 guys have averaged 22 a game. So I went and I looked up the list, and it was 10 guys, 700 games, 22 a game for their career. There were some guys who came close like David Thompson, who I think is one of the best guards I've seen in the last 45 years, but had a short career and had some drug issues. He didn't make it. He didn't play enough games. Pete Maravich, 24 .2 points a game, but he didn't play enough games. Kyrie hasn't played enough games yet. Bradley Beale is five games away. I'm actually kind of glad the cutoff's at 700 so we don't have to talk about him. And then Mitchell and Trey Young aren't there yet. There's only 10 guys that made it, and the 10 guys are all fucking awesome. And again, I mentioned this in the context of Dame, who we think he is versus the success he's had. So the 10 guys, Michael Jordan, 30 .1, Jerry West, 27 .1, Allen Averson, 26 .7, George Gervin, 26 .2, Oscar Robertson, 25 .7, Kobe, 25 .0, Harden, 24 .7, Curry, 24 .6, Wade, 22, barely made it, and Russ, 22 .4, and then Dame is at 25 again. All right, what does he not have that those other guys have? Well, MJ, don't need to talk about him. Don't need to talk about Jerry West, who's the freaking logo. Allen Averson, pretty good comparison, right? Big stats, really memorable player, but not a ton of success. Here's the difference. Averson made the finals once. He won an MVP. Dame has done neither of those things. George Gervin was the best scoring guard of the 70s. He made two final fours. He had some bad luck. He really, in 79, really should have came close. And some of it's on him, right? He could have come through. Bobby Dandridge is the one that ended up coming through for the Bullets. They lose. But two final fours, he had four top five MVP finishes, five first teams, four second teams. He was just unassailably the best guard in the league until MJ. Oscar Robertson, don't need to go through him, but he won a ring and an MVP. Kobe, five rings and an MVP. Eleven first teams for Kobe, by the way. James Harden, three final fours, an MVP, six top five MVP finishes, six first team MBAs. And even though Harden has never made the finals as the best guy, he made it with OKC as the sixth man, you could build a contender around Harden. We saw it. We haven't really seen it with Dame. I think that's a fair thing to bring up. Curry, four rings, two MVPs, you know, the Curry thing. Dwayne Wade, three rings, two top five MVPs, two first teams, three second teams. He's more in the Dame waters a little bit, but he had the 2006 finals and he was the second best guy with LeBron on those heat teams. And then Westbrook, who you would say, well, Dame had a better career than Westbrook. Did he? Westbrook made the finals in 2012. He was second best guy on that team. Almost made the finals in 2016. He won an MVP. He had two first teams and five second teams. It's at least like a real argument. And I think when you look at Dame, he only had that one 2019 round three, got bounced. He's only had one top five MVP finish. He's only had one first team MBA and four second team MBAs. Really, really good top 75 career. But the piece that's missing is, have you been on a really good team? Have you made a real run at it? Which is why, you know, I think this Milwaukee trade is so much fun. This is his real chance. I get nervous about a couple things with this trade. One is that, you know, if you look at the 33 and older guards who average 22 points a game in a season. Jordan did it twice. Curry did it twice. Still going. Kobe did it three times. Jerry West twice. Sam Jones once. Hal Greer once. That's the entire list. Now the NBA is different. We have more three -pointers now. It's easier to score. Scoring is the easiest it's ever been. Guys can play at a longer age. So I'm not ruling out Dane being good for the next three years. But just pointing out, history is saying, be a little nervous. In general with guards, like Chris Paul, we saw from age 35 to 36 to 37, like it just dropped. But that's two years older than Dane. Maybe it's fine. I just worry about guards. We have not a lot of instances with guards in their mid -30s of them either peaking as players or being able to sustain whatever success they had during their prime. It always starts to go down with really no exceptions, except for Steph Curry. He's the only non -exception. So if your case is Dane's as good as Steph Curry, or Dane can be as potent as Steph Curry on a winning team, like, you know, Steph Curry is better than Dane, but I'm not going to argue that he couldn't do a lot of the stuff that Curry did in Golden State. The bigger issue for me, the age I'm definitely worried about. Dane has not been healthy the last couple of years, and we have not seen him play nine straight months at playoff basketball with a big bullseye on his back. Everybody coming after you, you're the best team. We haven't seen him do that ever, much less than the last couple of seasons. So can he stay up? Can he stay healthy? That's one thing. The defense with Dane just got kind of swept under the rug the last couple days, and I don't really understand it because there's five categories of defensive player I feel like. There's excellent, there's good, there's average, there's not so good, and then there's bad. And I think Dane's a bad defender. I think the stats back it up. Like, his defensive rating last year was 245 out of the guards. He's the 245th guard for defensive rating. You know, 117 .4 individual defensive rating is 483 overall. Portland's team's always defensively, it was the Achilles heel for them. Partly because of Dane, because he couldn't guard anybody. He's too small. And, you know, think about what we saw from the playoffs the last couple years. I think about the 2020 bubble Celtics playoffs, not infrequently, because I think that team had a chance to potentially win a title. What happened? Everyone hunted Kemba Walker. It was hunting season. It's like, where is he? Got to get a switch. Got to get Kemba Walker guarding somebody who's bigger, or got to beat him off the dribble, and it just became a hunt session with him. And basically, he got played out of the league. He's not in the league anymore. You know, we had this with Isaiah Thomas, too, in the mid -2010s. I think it's been an issue with Kyrie Irving. The Celtics certainly went at him in the playoff series with Brooklyn a couple years ago. Curry, you saw, who I think is a better defender than people give him credit for, but the And he's a much better defender than Dame is. Jordan Poole is somebody that got hunted in playoff series recently. Chris Paul, obviously, is a big one. Jalen Brunson, remember what the Heat did to him? Mitchell, when he was on Utah, this was a huge issue. And then Trae Young, obviously. My fear with Dame is he's a DH, and I think in Portland, part of the reasons he was able to put up the stats he did was because he wasn't playing defense, right? It was just, how many points can I score? My team isn't very good, and I'm just going to do my thing. He's an incredible offensive player. But how much of a trade -off is the defense, right? Well, you think, all right, well, Milwaukee, they're really good defensively. They'll be able to protect him. Here's the team. Giannis, Dame, Lopez, Portis, Middleton, Conaton, Beauchamp, Crowder. Who's guarding Trae Young on this team? Who's guarding Jason Tatum? Here's a partial list of guys that I don't think this team will be able to guard this season. Devin Booker, Tatum, Butler, Trae Young, Kyrie, Curry. Who's going to be chasing Curry around the screens? Dame lowered? Good luck. SGA, Luca, Mitchell, Murray, Edwards, Brunson, Ja, Garland, Fox, Halburn. Are they going to be able to cover Derek White? I don't know. The way this team is constructed, they are not going to have the ability to guard other guards at all, which means they're just going to have to be in a shooting match with them, right? It's going to be not much different than what's going to happen with Phoenix, where they're just literally going to have to outscore the other team. I've just watched too much playoff basketball over the last couple years, where it's like, if you have that weak link on defense, and you're playing a team that's smart enough, they're going to go after that weak link. Like, think about them against the Lakers, right? The Lakers figure their crunch time. Let's say they make the finals. It's Milwaukee and the Lakers, and Lakers crunch time. They're going to have LeBron and Davis and Austin Reeves and, I don't know, a shooter and a point guard, whatever. All they're going to be doing is trying to find where Dame is on the court and going after him. What about when they play Boston? Boston puts out White and Brogdon and Tatum and Brown and a center, and all they're going to be doing is trying to make sure Dame is covering somebody who has the ball who's now torturing him. I think it's a real problem for them. And what's funny is they gave up Drew's defense and, you know, they, what they gave up on defense, which is significant, and they gained an offense, it might end up just being a wash and they might just be a different version of the same team where they still have a huge flaw. It's just on the other end of the court. I'm just shocked that nobody brought up the defense. I agree he's an amazing offensive player and what's cool about this trade and what I'm excited about as a basketball fan is, can he go up a level? Right? A lot of these stats he put up, especially the last couple years. They didn't mean anything. They were, he was on bad teams. Like, who cares? Ultimately, Bradley Beal scored 30 points a game on the Wizards. Who cares? I think most really good offensive players, if they're on a bad team, can get between 25 and 30 a night. Can you do it nine months in a row? Can you do it when you're getting hunted on defense all over the place? How much can Milwaukee protect him? And what does he have in the tank at age 33 with 900 plus games on the O 'Dominor already? I'm still afraid of the Bucks, but people have, like, FanDuel had them as best odds in basketball and I think most people feel like they're the favorite now. I don't feel like there's a favorite. I think you can go through every team. Boston, I could, I'm scared of Porzingis. What's going to happen with Jalen Brown out there? He has contracts. Can Peyton Pritchard, all these different things. Philly, God only knows. Miami, they're unquestionably worse. Yeah, Milwaukee is going to be really good, but depending where Holiday lands and how this all plays out, I just think it's still wide open. And the other piece, so if you're just talking Boston, Miami, Tatum kills Milwaukee. I have no idea why. Boston is kind of built to at least stay with Dame and, you know, Derek White is about as good of a person you're going to have to try to keep Dame in check, at least. And Boston's done a really good job of guarding Giannis over the years. They don't have Grant Williams this year, but I just don't think, I think there's as many ways this goes wrong as it goes right, I guess would be my final thought on this because for what they gave up, especially with that 29 unprotected and the two swaps and, you know, they are all in on this team. And you know my theory, when you go all in on a team, you better think you can win. Not positive, but it's an awesome trade. It really is. It makes the league so much more fun. Dame and Giannis together. I'm going to enjoy watching Portland. I still have my eating stock. Watching Phoenix fans slowly realize that Derkiszna isn't the answer is going to be fun and then we'll see where Drew Holliday goes. So really fun trade. We're going to talk about it a little bit more with Die Hard Bucks fan, Ben Thompson in one second. Let's take a break.
HASHR8
Fresh update on "austin" discussed on HASHR8
"In Prague, you have to have your team flying around and meeting the actual mining guys. There's not much mining in Central Europe really happening, but we happen to be the company from there providing some products related and supporting Bitcoin mining stack. So yeah, I mean, that's sort of like, I don't want to say like a daily business, but it's like a yearly business. That's a couple of events that we definitely don't want to miss from the calendar. And Honey Badger is actually one of them that our team goes there really regularly every year. And essentially, this was the first conference back in 2018 where we announced BrainsOS. So there is some tradition that draws us back to that place and venue. Yeah. Is there any conference that you're like, I have to hit this one every year, the Brains team has to hit this one every year? Because there's Honey Badger, there's the Hong Kong every year with Bitmain, there's like three or four in Austin per year. And then there's, of course, like the larger ones like ConsenSys, Permissionless, things like that. For people just like interested in the industry, like which ones have you found to be like the highest signal? Well, for us as a company providing the mining shovels essentially in the software field for now, and also entering the hardware, we definitely want to be the disrupt, mining disrupt. Sure, the big ones like Bitcoin 2023 this year. Bitcoin Amsterdam is also some place, is a place where you can meet our team. I know there is specific Bitcoin happening in a few weeks, isn't it? So that's where we are going to be for sure.
The Breakdown
A highlight from Chokepoint Across the Pond: Chase UK Says No Crypto Transactions
"We've got election season coming up, remember? And if the Dems win and Gensler comes back to the same office, he doesn't care because he has the wind at his sails. And if he loses, he also doesn't care because he's out of the job. I would expect, in other words, for every court decision that goes against the SEC to be answered not with a rational shift in policy and approach, but instead two blazing middle fingers from a bureaucrat potentially on his way out the door. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, September 27th, and today we are talking about this crazy, strange Chase UK letter banning people from accessing crypto from their bank accounts. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find the link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, I have to start the show by eating some crow. In the morning yesterday, a letter started going around that people were, of course, breathlessly posting as fact long before it was confirmed, and it just did not read right to me. So much so that as more and more people started tweeting about it, I actually posted it saying, I think this letter is fake. Let me just read the whole thing to you. So it's not long, so you have a sense of why I was skeptical. The header says Chase, and it says our policy around crypto is changing. Here's what it means for you. Hi. To help keep your money safe from fraud and scams, we're changing the type of payments you can make from Chase. From 16th of October, 2023, if we think you're making a payment related to crypto assets, we'll decline it. If you'd still like to invest in crypto assets, you can try using a different bank or provider instead, but please be cautious as you may not be able to get the money back if the payment ends up being related to fraud or a scam. Please head to our website for more info about how to protect your money. We've made this decision because fraudsters are increasingly using crypto assets to steal large sums of money from people. Declining these payments is one of the ways we're help keeping you and your money safe. All the best, the Chase team. So a couple of things that really stood out to me. One was the tone in general non -professionalism of the letter. The use of the word fraudsters seemed very, very strange from an official corporate communication. This is obviously quite a colloquialism and so the idea that it was being used as a formal explanation for why a bank would be denying an entire category of payments options to its users seemed a little crazy. Continuing that questionable tone was the ending, all the best. That's how I sign off my emails. That's not how a major bank signs off its emails. Now, of course, there was also the general grossness of the policy if it were to become real, but that really wasn't even what I was thinking about initially. And yet, shockingly, it was confirmed to be real. I was wrong and somehow a bank associated with Chase had sent out that letter. Now, later in the day, it became clear that the policy was for Chase UK rather than the broader US or international banks. But even if it was only a domestic UK policy, the aggressive move still rubbed many people, perhaps most people, I would say, in the industry the wrong way. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted, Now, Andrew Griffith is the UK Economic Secretary to the Treasury and Minister for the City of London and Rishi Sunak is, of course, the Prime Minister who was formerly the Chancellor of the Exchequer who said while he was at that post that he wanted to make the UK a crypto hub. LightSpark CEO and former head of the Libra project at Meta, David Marcus, added, Now, UK commenters were surprisingly quiet and that's perhaps because Chase is a relatively minor player in the UK despite being a major global banking brand. Chase has, in fact, only had a presence in the UK for around two years and has less than two million customers. They're also limited to offering online services, so are, in practice, a lot closer to a fintech platform than a traditional bank. Just by way of comparison, relative to the population, Chase UK has a similar footprint to Huntington National Bank in the US. Now, if Huntington banned crypto transactions in the US, you can bet we would be chattering about it, but it wouldn't ultimately be seen as that big of a deal which perhaps explains the lack of outrage from UK crypto investors. That said, of course, Chase isn't Huntington. Regardless of whether they have a large customer base, Chase UK is still a subsidiary of the largest western bank in the world and because of that, the important part of the policy change is unpacking whether this is an idiosyncratic decision of an insignificant bank or speaks to a broader policy outlook at JPMorgan Chase. Now, the reason given in the letter for this policy change was, of course, to prevent fraud. When fielding questions from media throughout the day, a Chase spokesperson doubled down, saying, Austin Campbell rightly points out, quote, Bitcoin attorney Crypto Hat responded, Austin, eminently reasonable as he always is, responded, and other financial institutions to fight said fraud, not turtling. Now, of course, even if this policy change only affects a couple of million Brits, it still matters in the broader fight to ensure crypto investors and firms have fair access to banking services. This has, of course, been one of the biggest themes throughout this year. The pushback from the US crypto community matters in order to ensure that banks can see that these sort of blanket bans are simply not an acceptable way to deal with issues around fraudulent transactions. And for a place that said it wants to be a crypto hub, the UK in particular has had a string of larger banks rejecting crypto payments over the past year. In February, a group of CEOs from major UK banks appeared at a parliamentary hearing. Multiple CEOs said their banks were blocking crypto payments, and although they listed fraud as a major concern, they also mentioned the volatility of crypto investments. The problem became so large that the UK's Financial Conduct Authority published a report on de -banking earlier this month. The report stated that the regulator had facilitated conversations between banks and crypto firms to ensure that they would be able to open and maintain accounts. Still, some large UK banks, including NatWest, are currently refusing to service crypto firms across the board. Now, one alternative opinion came from Francis Pulio, the founder at Bull Bitcoin. He said, via video chat, and essentially interrogate them to make sure they aren't being sucked into a yield, cloud mining, or other crypto ponzis. Still, as you might imagine, even among Bitcoiners who share Francis's disgust with crypto scams, this wasn't the primary opinion out there. Indeed, by and large, the sentiment was, and this is the end -then -they -fight -you phase. So what to do? Well, some, like dGen Spartan, basically say vote with your feet. They write, but getting banks to open accounts for crypto individuals and companies is another. Just vote with your money. My crypto -friendly banks get my highest share of account. The others? Meh. Now, another response is the entrepreneurial opportunity. Rama Lawalia, the CEO of Lumida Wealth, said, Although, indeed, later he tweeted, I don't know, man. All in all, it feels a little choke pointy to me. Remember, the whole point of Operation Choke Point and why it's problematic is that it creates a scenario where government and regulators don't have to ban anything because they just make it so economically untenable and politically risky for big service providers like banks to work with crypto companies that a de facto ban is the natural response. And speaking of de facto bans, let's turn now to the intransigent SEC, a bipartisan group of House Financial Service Committee members have written to SEC chair Gary Gensler calling for the regulator to immediately approve spot Bitcoin ETF applications. Mike Flood, Tom Emmer, Willie Nickel and Richie Torres penned the letter, which asserted that, The SEC's current posture is untenable moving forward. Following the Court of Appeals decision, there is no reason to continue to deny such applications under inconsistent and discriminatory standards.
The Dan Bongino Show
Scott Presler: Registering Voters Will Make Biden a One-Term President
"Better than the government ever could and so I just started traveling the country and we organized cleanups in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Duquesne, Detroit, Houston, Colosso, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Nashville, Portland, Pittsburgh, but more importantly Dan weaving in voter registration into this my work although it was helping to clean up the cities was only a band -aid if we want to make long lasting change it means registering voters and so I started turning my cleanup efforts into voter events registration what better way to decide who our city council members are and school board members and mayors and state representatives and so now what I'm asking as we go into this November and beyond is guys look for ripe opportunities to register voters at your churches at your synagogues address pro shop at a movie theater during sound of freedom at Jason Aldean concerts at gun shows we have so many a myriad of opportunities to register conservatives to vote and then we get them out to vote this november and beyond we
Capstone Conversation
What Makes One City Better Than Another? Broker Ed Del Beccaro Weighs In
"From a broker's perspective, what makes one city better than another? Talk specifically about that approval process. Let's talk about that. First, we should talk about regional. So my workforce, we use what we call the phrase 360 commute shed. So depending upon the kind of tenant, so the original migration of tenants in the 80s and early 90s was from San Francisco to the greater East Bay. That's why you saw all the buildings built in San Ramon, Pleasanton, 680 Coroner, places like that. And one reason they moved is their workforce was there. So they followed the workforce in that case. So it wasn't that they didn't like San Francisco. So that's Chevron. That was Wells Fargo. That was B of A, Metropolitan Life Insurance, all the big users in that area. So they actually followed the workforce. And one reason why you follow your workforce, there's studies that if you have a one way commute of over an hour and 10 minutes or an hour and a half one way, you're going to lose 40 to 50 percent of your workforce. Therefore, I might love San Francisco or might love downtown L .A., but I have to go where I think I can get my workforce. And where's my workforce of the future? So first of all, it's a regional decision before it's a city decision. So even if I locate in a city as central as Walnut Creek, I might have some of my workforce coming from Fairfield, Benicia, Richmond, Oakland, South San Francisco and Tri -Valley. So what then? So therefore, the first question is, where is my workforce? Where is my future workforce? To answer the second question of where is my future workforce? I have a salary range that I can afford as a company. And the current insurance and banks are usually in the 60 to 130 thousand range. You then work that backwards. And if I hire somebody for one hundred thousand, one hundred twenty thousand, will that person be able to pay rent or buy a house in a given region? If they can't, if their average rental, if the average apartment rents are forty thousand a year, if the average mortgage is five thousand a year, five thousand a month, rather, then I have to move further afield. So that's why you see companies now leaving the inner bay, going to Sacramento and Austin region. Then within a region, once a decision is made that I can, my current workforce is in a given region, let's say East Bay. Then let's say the second thing is I know that I can afford my workforce over the next 10 years to live there and pay them the market rates. Then what city do I go to within a sub region? There, every city is the best when you ask the cities, but then we make decisions based on location to transportation, locations relative to interchanges, locations relative to barred mass transit. Because again, if I have people coming in from 360 degrees, 20 miles, let's say to 40 miles away from any given point, if I'm in Fairfield, how do I get to East County? If I'm in Fairfield, how do I get to San Ramon? If I'm in Tracy, how do I get to Walnut Creek? Or if I'm in Fremont, how do I get to Walnut Creek? So then we tried to centrally locate where most of those workers are. And then within that region, what cities have the better approval process? Because the new kinds of tenants that are coming into the region are not the back office tenants. That was pretty simple build out. Cubes, called them Dilbert Farms. That's what you saw the original migration wave. Now we have laboratories, we have more involved IT, more involved investment in infrastructure and more complicated uses. So then the question is, if we're going to grow and expand, what city next to a transportation central can best accommodate our strategy of expansion and with approvals? And then second, what's the business environment? Some cities, unfortunately, in our area have raised their business payroll tax to extraordinarily high. They're in effect, some companies won't go there. You go next door.
The Bill Simmons Podcast
A highlight from Austin Rivers on NBA Vet Life, QB Arguments With Steven Ruiz, and Canceling 'Winning Time' With Chris Ryan
"Coming up, basketball, football, television, three of my favorite things next. It's the Bill Simmons Podcast presented by FanDuel. Get in on the football action right from the opening kickoff with America's number one sports book. The app is safe, secure, easy to use. FanDuel always has exclusive offers. When you win, you'll get paid instantly. FanDuel has lots of ways to play like the spread, money line, over -unders, team totals, player props, so much more. Jump into the action at any time during the game with live betting. Combine multiple bets from the same game in a same game parlay. Download the FanDuel sports book app today. Make every moment more this football season. The ringer is committed to responsible gaming. Please visit the ringer .com slash RG to learn more about the resources and helplines available and listen to the end of this episode for additional details. You must be 21 plus and present in select states. Gambling problem, call 1 -800 -GAMBLER or visit the ringer .com slash RG. This episode is presented by NFL Sunday Ticket now on YouTube and YouTube TV. Football season is here. NFL Sunday Ticket lets you watch all your favorite teams right at home. Now available exclusively on YouTube and YouTube TV. NFL Sunday Ticket gives you access to all out -of -market Sunday afternoon games. You can watch on up to six devices at once and stream up to four games at the same time. With multi -view, I know you will. Get NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube or bundle with YouTube TV to get even more. We're also brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network where I put up a new rewatchables on Monday night. One of my favorite movies of the last 30 years. It is the 30 year anniversary this month of this movie. A Bronx Tale, just an all time classic with lots of life lessons. Me, Sean Fantasy, Chris Ryan, Van Lathan. We broke it down for almost two hours and I had an awesome, awesome time. We also have my birthdays next week. So we always do a big birthday movie and I'm even more excited for next week. So there you go.
Cyber Security Weekly Podcast
A highlight from Episode 377 - Artificial Intelligence and Operational Resiliency
"This is Jane Lo, and I'm at the Global Resiliency Federation office here in Singapore. And with me today, I'm very pleased and very privileged to have Mark Orsi, who is the CEO of GRF or Global Resiliency Federation, all the way from United States of America. So thank you, Mark, for your time today. Thank you for having me. And so Mark will be sharing with us the latest in terms of artificial intelligence, which is causing a lot of excitement nowadays, as well as the operational resiliency framework, which has been developed by GRF over the last year or so. So Mark, you know, give us a brief introduction about yourself and also GRF and what, you know, the organisation does. And I also understand that you're very passionate about AI. So tell us about the history of your career as well. Sure. So I started as an aerospace engineer many, many years ago. And after aerospace, I was in computer science and I was working on computer vision. So it's really been interesting to see the journey until today. But additionally, so the last 15 years or so, I've been in the financial services sector primarily and technology risk and cybersecurity. I worked at Goldman Sachs for about eight years, KPMG for a few years, JP Morgan for a few years. And then in the past four years, I've been at Global Resilience Federation and we're a non -profit. We manage and support 17 different sharing communities. ISACs, which are really information sharing and analysis centres, they're collective defence communities where organisations join together to help protect themselves against the various threats that are out there. And of course, you have your conference later in October, later this year in Texas. Yeah, Austin, Texas, October 11th through 12th. Anybody who's local or who wants to make the journey, please come. We also have an OTI set conference on September 6th coming right up. More local. But yeah, it's an iteration of it, sixth year running. And it's security and third -party risk. So we have practitioners, CISOs, third -party risk practitioners, business resilience practitioners. And we have a whole track on AI security. So we've worked for the last six months with 20 organisations on two papers. One is a CISO guide to AI security and one is a practitioner's guide. So let's start with AI, which is what gets people excited nowadays. So tell us, you've got a great vintage point from America, which is a leader in many ways when it comes to technology and innovations. So what is the conversation like in terms of the business use cases that you see in America? Sure, we're coming from a cybersecurity and resilience perspective. And so I was on a call, it was about a week and a half after ChatGBT was released in November of last year. A hundred different chief information security officers on the call, really all concerned about maybe business forging ahead without really taking any security considerations into play. But also about some of the major strengths that they could, how can we use this for good as well, right? How can we use it to find vulnerabilities? How can we use it to secure our code? So an example is one of the organisations had been using a tool like it to actually rewrite their code base and translate into different language, which added memory management to their code and then translate it back to the original language. And they were also using it then to multiply their developers time by tenfold, because they didn't have to write the test cases and additional code around developers. So there's plenty of benefits to it and there's plenty of risks, right? We need to think about the whole pipeline, whether we have in -house AI models or whether we're using third parties, there's different kinds of risks that we need to consider. There's also been a lot of talk of using AI large language models to do predictive diagnostics in healthcare, right? And GRF, of course, you have more than, what, 20 member organisations? It's 17 different ones, yes, 17. And one of them is Health iSAT, right? So talking to your member communities, do you see a difference in terms of the pace of adoption in terms of using AI? Yeah, absolutely. And so we worked with 20 different organisations, including some healthcare, some manufacturing, some energy and others, to put together a guide on AI security, both the practitioner guide and a CISO guide. And yes, there's different pace of adoption. There's organisations that have been using machine learning and AI for many, many years. And but with the advent of this generative AI, there's just a tremendous amount of concern and the pace of change is much more rapid. It used to be every year you'd have change and now it's every week. There's new things happening. So of course, artificial intelligence is not new in cyber security. How is this latest innovation of using large language models, how is that going to be different in terms of adoption in cyber security? I think you mentioned a few sort of like... I think some of the power of it is that ultimately, if you think about the resource limits that we have, there's always constraints on the number of resources that are available that are cyber focused and cyber educated. And so for us to take the power of some of those large language model generative AI and sort of multiply the efforts of the staff that we have, then we can also meet some of the needs that we have from a resource perspective. Also, I think ultimately we're going to get into very targeted threat intelligence to where it'll be based upon our own assets. So if you're an enterprise and you have specific assets and you have specific threats in your sector, then the intelligence that you're delivered would be very targeted to your organization specifically. So it's going to get much more powerful over time to give you tailored threat intelligence. Do you think that the rate of adoption on the cyber defense side is possibly faster than how the threat actors are adopting... Yeah, I mean, that's a big concern, right? I think probably we'll be behind the curve. All right, okay. I think there was even talk early on about just pausing the pace of developments, making sure that we have the regulatory framework so that we know how to do this ethically and responsibly. So I think from a machine learning perspective, we could be doing very well, but I think from a generative AI perspective, we may be behind the curve a little bit. So I think the complexity of attacks, I think we'll be putting essentially nation -state tools into every threat actor's hands. So I think it's a very sort of concerning few years as we work to try and match the pace of change. You think that is something that is quite realistic that will happen, or is it just kind of like a hype? Because there's some part that human developers or human threat actors are possibly a lot more sophisticated when it comes to developing the malware code. And you can kind of tell the difference between one that's generated by generative AI and one that's written by human developers. I'll give you an example of just a very personal use case. So I was working with my son just a couple of weeks ago, and we found an old Nintendo DS. And so he wanted to run videos on his old Nintendo DS. And so we used ChatGBT to learn how to hack into our Nintendo DS to make it display videos. So he never had any programming experience, but we were able to do this. So this is exactly what I'm like, you know, we can put these tools into everybody's hands. So how do we, you know, we need to be extra vigilant as this change happens. So what do you think is the immediate step that cyber defenders have to take in face of this threat? Well, I think there's a few things. Number one, we need to be moving forward to be using it in the right ways, to be using it from a defender perspective. So if it is helping us to find vulnerabilities quicker, if it's helping us to develop threat intelligence better, that's more tailored towards each individual organization. But also just from security and ethics perspective, there's all sorts of different attacks that can happen to those, whether it's on the input data, whether it's in the model itself, you can embed undetectable backdoors in these models. So if you're using a third party to develop your models, you need to be very concerned and maybe even have multiple models to compare the answers. Now, some people also say, right, let's just get the basics right, right? So for example, we'll get more sophisticated phishing emails, right? So that just means more awareness in terms of how to spot a fake email from a genuine email. So that's kind of like the basics that we need to sort out. Yeah, but it's also addressing all the different aspects of that. You know, I mentioned the models themselves. So protecting the models, protecting the data. You don't want data poisoning. You want to detect and monitor these things because they may evolve over time. And you need to be really concerned about your third parties because every third party is going to be introducing AI. So we talk about an AI bill of materials. So the same as you have a software bill of materials, we want to think about how can we develop an AI bill of materials? So how can you ensure that the training data and the model that's being used, right, how do we know which models we're using and which training data is being used? So if we find an ethical bias or we find some, let's say it was trained on a set of a code that had malware embedded in it or a set of code that had logic bombs in it, you don't want to embed logic bombs in your new code that you're writing by using these tools. So we need to make sure that the training data is clean. For example, let's just take the example of data poisoning, right? So that is perhaps, you know, looking at how you provide access levels to your data set. So it's not any difference from sort of the basic cybersecurity measures, right? Right. It's using some of the same constructs that you have across others. But one of the things that you need to be concerned about too, though, is these are dynamic, some of these are dynamic models. Right now, it's a very static world. We have these models that were trained in, you know, 2021 data, right? But in the near future, these things will be much more dynamic and actually responding to the inputs to change their behavior. So you'll need to be monitoring. Yeah, that's very different. Right, okay. So I think one final question on the copy of AI before we move to operational resilience framework. A lot of people say, right, AI is going to mean, you know, perhaps job losses, right? And how do you see that playing out in the cybersecurity field? So I'm, you know, concerned in general. I studied AI 30 years ago. I was concerned about it then. You know, I thought the first sort of impact would be with self -driving cars and in our transportation industry. I think it turns out that, you know, these models advanced very quickly, maybe quicker than people were expecting. But it's going to take a very long time for us to sort of digest that through all of our business models that we have right now. But I think it's going to multiply our efforts. I think cybersecurity is an industry where we're very resource constrained, where people, there's way more cyber resources are required than we have people. So it'll just multiply our capabilities and maybe meet the needs that we have. So I think that's a very positive thing. Ultimately, I think our economy will be changing in the next decade or two decades in different ways. And I think we can only imagine what those changes will be. Right. Okay. So talking about overcoming some of these challenges, it means like resiliency, right? So that plays into the next topic, operational resilience framework. So tell us what this resiliency means in the context of this framework and perhaps cybersecurity. So back in 2018, there was a paper from the Bank of England. So regulatory guidance on operational resilience and impact tolerance. And so it was really thinking about the potential systemic impacts of bank failures on customers and partners. And so the question was, well, how do we respond to that? What are the things that we need to do to ensure that we can continue to operate our critical services through a crisis, even if it's an impaired state? So we, Trey Moss, who is the CEO of Sheltered Harbor, it was an initiative from FSISAC to help protect consumer data. So if there was a bank failure or a bank disruption, you could still access your bank account information. So it would prevent sort of a run on the bank or this systemic impact from it. So we took that concept and Trey was always thinking, hey, we probably need to do more than just protect this little piece of data. It was in a distributed and immutable way that the different banks and the standard format that different banks could access. We need to also prevent the bank from failing its critical services. So we were working with him, Bill Nelson, who is the CEO of FSISAC for 12 years. And he's our board of directors. Trey and I, we met for about a year to say, well, what should we be doing beyond just protecting this little piece of information? What are those critical services that we need to protect? And we need to make sure that through a crisis they would operate, even if it's an impaired state. So we developed a path to operational resilience. We worked with 100 organizations and financial services regulators to develop a very simple path that was meant really for every industry, not just for financial services. And so it's a path of seven steps, 37 rules. We tried to make it very simple. It's aligned to NIST and ISO standards and extends existing business continuity and disaster recovery type standards and frameworks. It takes a holistic approach and really looking outward instead of inward on saying these are internal business services that we need to keep running. Those we call business critical services. Operations critical are those things that your customers and your partners depend upon. And so making sure that those continue to run through a crisis. If you have a wiperware attack, you have a ransomware attack, you have a data center fire, you want to make sure that your customers' critical services continue to function through that crisis. So take an example of, say, a ransomware attack. So attack ransomware hitting one of these industrial organizations, right? So how would this resiliency framework help, you know, plug some of the gaps? So what's interesting is we've done this very much from an IT focus. We want to extend it to an OT realm as well. So we'll be working with OT ISAC and manufacturing ISAC late this year, early next year, and we'll set up a working group to do that. But actually one of our first scenarios that we put out there, it's, you know, freely downloadable from our website, grf .org, is a scenario that we call it ACME pipeline. And it was essentially a replication of colonial pipeline incident to highlight the benefits of an operational resilient framework approach. And so we looked at, you know, what are those critical services from a pipeline? And it was really just delivering petroleum. So there are a bunch of regulatory responses they have to have. There's payroll, there's all these different systems. When it comes to what do you actually deliver to your customers and your business partners, it was just delivery of petroleum. So making sure that they could deliver petroleum through that crisis, if they had a ransomware attack or a wipe away attack, what are those things they needed to do to ensure, even if it's an impaired state, how do I deliver that to my high priority customers and my low priority customers and designing so that let's say I could only operate at 80 % capacity. Can I still provide service to my low priority customers or do I need to only provide service to my high priority customers? So understanding at what point do you cut off service or do you are you going to disappoint some people because it's no longer a service to them. Designing that into your system and pre -planning that is part of this framework. Right, yes, yeah. So it's kind of like looking at from a sort of a consequence perspective on the mission factors rather perspective than start from the asset inventory kind of that traditional. It was interesting, I was hearing some of the same language that we were developing over the last two years coming from the OT experts on the panels as well about exactly that, about operating through a crisis, about the mission critical functions. Right, okay. So we just talked about one scenario which is ransomware and you are looking to sort of, I guess, expand to different types of scenarios to try to help organizations assess where they are in terms of their maturity when it comes to resiliency, yes? Yeah, so it really doesn't matter what the type of attack is, right? And also I think one of the concerns, we've been very sort of IT focused and very much we talked about the data and making sure that it's distributed and immutable, but also from a service perspective. So you want to make sure that you can deliver those services. That's right. Whether it includes manpower or whether it includes just technology. So that's very important. So what are the next steps then? So you say that the efforts started in 2019, yes? There's two active working groups right now. So one is we're developing a maturity model. We're going to release the next iteration in October of this year at our conference, which is in Austin, Texas. So not local. But so the next iteration will come with a maturity model, some of the comments that we've received from multiple industries, and we're still actively seeking, we want to make sure it's a cross -industry approach. We also have another working group focused on a scenario that's in the financial sector. So in ACH payments network disruption, ACH is, you know, domestic cash payments are made through this ACH network, and it's $76 trillion a year. So it's a very significant system. And so what would a disruption like that, how would it impact banks? And how should we be thinking about operational resilience in that scenario? So working through that, we'll probably do an exercise in November of this year, which would be open to many banks to have that discussion. So we'll be looking at the next steps. Like I mentioned, we'll be looking to extend the framework to OT, ICS concerns. And we'll be looking to, you know, develop the third iteration and additional scenarios. So what is the first thing that organizations have to do if they want to adopt your framework? So they can go to our website now and freely download it. It's available. They can actually review it and give feedback. But also think about how they can use it in their organizations, right? What some in major banks, they're using it just to develop training materials. So organizations, they're different business units across the globe regionally, and different business units can consider operational resilience and how they work. So I think it's a really good learning tool. And ultimately, as they implement it, the first steps are, number one, we build it upon the baseline of NIST and ISO standards. IDLE, change management, making sure they have core standards, core practices in place, core controls, and then naming an operational resilience executive. So really getting somebody who has visibility across business and technology. Yeah, a champion of it, who can sustain it through organizational change, right? Who can really have some power and authority to implement it. That's really important. And then you can start walking through the framework and doing the things that are necessary. It'll take investment, it'll take some work to really become more resilient. And so we're working on the maturity model as well, so people can evaluate sort of where they are and where they think they might have gaps. Can they participate in one of your working groups so that they can assess to see how they can practically use it? Yeah, they can contact me. No, happy to have that. Happy to have people reach out to me and contact us. Again, our website, grf .org .org. And yeah, we're continuing to develop new working groups and new sector focal points. Our goal is to make the whole ecosystem more resilient, to figure out how organizations can do that and to contribute to security and resilience in any way that we can. So this is one way to do that. Possibly there's a way to incorporate AI element, the latest generative AI element. I would love it, right? I love it. I mean, that's a real passion of mine from many years ago. So it's great to kind of see it finally come into play. And we just have to address it in the right way and with the right security concerns. So, well, Mark, thank you so much for your time today to talk to us about generative AI, as well as operational resiliency framework that GRF is developing. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you, Jane.
Bankless
A highlight from ROLLUP: CFTC's Attack On Crypto | FTX Offloading Billions | Live From Permissionless!
"Bankless nation, it is that time again for the weekly roll -up and David and I are doing it from a special location again. Oh my God, I forgot to set you up, David. Let me ask you the official question. Sure, let's do it. David, what time is it? Oh, it's the Bankless Friday weekly roll -up, but it's happening on Thursday because we are on Wednesday, the third day of permission list here in the Kraken booth on the floor of Austin, Texas. We have a live audience for the first time ever. It's a little bit intimidating. Live audience. studio There's 50 Bankless citizens, people in the Bankless Dow, all watching us as I speak these words right now. I don't know how I feel about that, but here we go. You know what? We're just going with it. This is a fantastic setup that we have here at Permissionless 2023, actually Permissionless 2. Permissionless 2. That's what they call it, and Kraken put this booth together for us. So extremely grateful for the hospitality. This is a professional setup. This is way better than my home office. Not to hit amateur shit, that's for sure. I know. So David and I are in person today, obviously, and are here to bring you The Week We Roll Up! All right. Topics of the week, David. What are we talking about, man? The CFTC has joined the SEC in the fight against crypto. Oh, wait. That's bad. That's a bad thing. Yeah, I thought they were the good guys. That's not great. Okay. Well, there's more. FTX is about to sell a huge portion of their token holdings. Should we? Oh, that's also bad. Oh, no. Ethereum Foundation just dropped a proposal on a native liquid staking. That's good. That's good. Okay. That's a good thing. And then finally, friend .tech, not dead yet. Okay. Also good. Also good. I came back from Burning Man, and I thought that friend's tech would be dead, and it was like four times larger than I ever thought that it would be. Is there some signal there? Yeah. And then my share price going into Burning Man was 0 .7. Dude, I don't want to hear about your share price. And I came back from Burning Man, and it was 0 .2, and I was sad. Well, that makes me happy, though. Sorry, David. And then some more bad news of the week. Vitalik's Twitter got hacked, X got hacked, some details around that, and how to protect yourself from Twitter, and how to make sure that you actually might be exposed. You might have your phone number in Twitter, and you don't know about it. So we're going to talk about that. There's one that I didn't know, like if Vitalik can get hacked, then what about the rest of us? David, before we get into the chatter of the week, and I know we want to talk about permission lists even before we get to the markets, we got to do a shout out to our friends and sponsors over at Aave, because a lot of you guys listening are still in Aave V2, and there's the opportunity to upgrade to Aave V3. Cool. Tell them why they should upgrade, David. Well, first off, the Aave V3 protocol is just better than V2. V3 is better than 2, it's a higher number, but why is it better? There's just a different amount of efficiency. There's asset efficiency in Aave V3, there's gas efficiency in Aave V3, there's some extra bells and whistles. There's asset isolation mode, so you can get some better parameters for specific assets inside of isolation mode, and then you can also just do a bunch of things all at once, like remove assets, swap assets, redeploy assets, all on a single transaction because of Aave V3. So if you are one of the users that has up to over a billion dollars in Aave V2, everything is better if we all have the same party rather than two different parties, so go and migrate from Aave V2 to Aave V3, you laggard. Yes, because three is better than two. Three is better than two. There's also Aave Grants DAO, so grants, that's free money for builders who are building on the Aave protocol with extra emphasis on the Go stablecoin, the brand new stablecoin out of Aave, so if you would like free money, do you like free money? Yeah, I mean this isn't quite free because I gotta build something, David. Sure, okay, you create your labor for money, but unconditional money after you build something or to build something, I don't know, details are in the show notes also at avegrants .org. I'd be down. All right, before we get to markets, I think the people deserve an update on Permissionless. Okay, so let's talk Permissionless. It's been great so far. We're on the second, the last third of the last day of Permissionless, so it's coming to a close. So do you want to tell me about some of your favorite talks so far? Let's start with the content. I've done eight talks. Done eight talks? Excuse me, I have moderated eight panels. Yes. So I'm racking up the content. How many did you get to? I did one, David. Eight to one. Wow. Is lower better or higher better? It depends on whether you like to do lots of panels or not. I love doing panels. Okay, I don't. So anytime someone asks me to do a panel, I'm like, David, would you like to do this panel? Wait, that's how I ended up with eight? Okay. I think that my favorite one was we did a Jesse Pollock and Ben Jones on chain is the new online conversation, which, I mean, we just had them on for the super chain, but this was a net new episode, net new conversation, and I really enjoyed that one. That one felt really fun, and that one I actually just did not prepare for because I just know these guys and I'm just haunted in sphere. What was the takeaway from that? So we have like on chain is the new online. This is the new top of funnel for base. Base is kind of like base in the front, optimism governance in the back. We have the golden era of web three design happening around base. Like we're getting better at design for attracting new people to get them on chain. And then we have retroactive public's good funding in the back. And so connecting that, those dots and filling in the gaps a little bit and then talking about how this is a flywheel, right? More people coming in on base leads to more retroactive public goods funding, which makes base better as a part of the OP stack, which leads to more people coming into base. And this is all a flywheel that hopefully scales public goods out to the world. That is a TLDR, the conversation doesn't mean that you shouldn't also go listen to it. It's available on the YouTube, on block works, YouTube, not bank this YouTube, actually. There's an, you know, yeah. Do you want to ask me what my favorite one was? Sure. You only did one. It was actually the one that I loved. And it wasn't because of me. It wasn't because of the moderator. But the panel that we got to do with the regulators. So it was Hester Purse. I think we'll talk about it later in the episode. Hester Purse, Brian Quinten CFTC regulator, Tom Emmer, House Majority Whip. So we got a member of Congress to come to our crypto conference. And then Kristen Smith. Of course. And she's kind of a crypto lobbyist. And this honestly, it gave me some hope, David. Because things are looking kind of bleak from a U .S. regulatory perspective. And this gave me some hope because these people are fired up and they were ready to fight for crypto. And they have some power in D .C. to do that. You say bleak, but it's definitely bleak with strong notes of optimism.
Thinking Crypto News & Interviews
A highlight from GARY GENSLER ATTACKS STONER CATS NFTS & RIPPLE XRP WILL FIGHT SEC, HEDERA HBAR STABLECOIN STUDIO!
"Welcome back to the Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. If you are new here, please hit that subscribe button as well as the thumbs up button and leave a comment below. If you're listening on a podcast platform such as Spotify, Apple or Google, please leave a five star rating and review. It supports the podcast and it doesn't cost you anything. Well, folks, I want to start off with the SEC versus NFTs. Stoner Cats agrees to pay a one million dollar fine to settle SEC charges. The Hollywood superstar backed Stoner Cats NFTs has neither admitted nor denied the SEC's allegation that it issued an unregistered security. So once again, folks, we see regulation by enforcement by scumbag regulator Gary Gensler. They're not putting out the clear rules of the road. And we even have two commissioners that dissented from this enforcement action. So we see even folks within the SEC don't agree. But we know Gary Gensler has been running around with a false narrative saying everything in the crypto industry is a security and that it's breaking securities laws. But of course, he's not providing any guidance. And we saw even members of Congress question him. Tell us what is it, which crypto coins and tokens are securities? Is Ethereum a security? Is XRP is a security? He can't answer. Right. So we are dealing with nonsense. And, you know, the challenging part here is that he takes these settlements here because these companies don't have the capital to fight the government, to fight the SEC. You saw Ripple. It's they spent one hundred million dollars to fight the SEC. So many of these companies don't have that type of capital. So they settle just to get the SEC off their back. But unfortunately, you know, Gary adds this to his wins list. Now, the good thing is that Stoner Cats is not some major brand, you know, well -known. The defeat that the SEC took with Grayscale and Ripple and I think soon Coinbase, those are big names and well -known. So they carry more weight when, you know, Gary takes the loss. So let me give you the details here, guys. The U .S. Securities and Exchange has charged and settled with NFT issuer Stoner Cats, too, for allegedly offering an unregistered security. Without denying or admitting to the SEC's allegations, Stoner Cats, too, has agreed to cease and desist from offering the NFTs and pay a one million dollar fine. Stoner Cats, too, also agreed to destroy all NFTs in its possession and issue a notice of order on its website and social media channels, the SEC said. Now Stoner Cats, if you're wondering who is the Hollywood backers, it was issued by actors Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis. They released 10 ,000 NFTs in a highly anticipated drop in July 2021. The drop raised eight million dollars. Now, folks, you see how ridiculous this is, you know? So what does that make any artwork that's put out there on the Web, right? Let's say it's not in NFT format. Let's say it's baseball cards or sports cards. This is just ridiculous. The SEC is completely overreaching here. And don't get me wrong, they have a job to do to monitor these NFT prices and crypto projects because there are bad actors. But clearly they're going after the good actors and they're leaving many bad actors to do their thing. So this really sucks. Now, SEC Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Ueda issued a dissenting opinion Wednesday arguing the Howey test cannot be met. So clearly, clearly the SEC is divided here and we know the entire industry and even members of Congress are not on board with this nonsense. But Congress has to act. The onus is on them to get the rules in place because Gary is just going to continue his nonsense and he's trying to get that Treasury job. So he's just trying to rack up wins here to say, see, look at all the enforcement actions I took. Look at all the capital I got. And he won't give the details to say, hey, these guys were just trying to issue NFTs. He'll say, you know, they're scammers, they're hucksters, they're doing all kinds of bad activity. Right. So that's his narrative. So we got to fight, folks. And this is why we use social media to our advantage, contact your representatives and much more. Here's what Mark Ueda had to say. Analyzing investment contracts in this way carries implications for creators of all kinds. We're to apply these securities laws to physical collectibles in the same way we applied them to NFTs. Artist creativity would wither in the shadow of legal ambiguity. Mark summed it up really well there. This is really, really insane what the SEC is doing. And we got to keep fighting, folks. But scumbag regulator Gary Gensler continues. Now, interestingly enough, yesterday, some folks from Ripple were interviewed by CNBC. And here's the headline from CNBC. Ripple says it will fight the SEC lawsuit all the way through. Ripple said it plans to fight the ongoing lawsuit with the U .S. Securities Exchange Commission all the way through its president, Monica Long, told CNBC. Ripple is among the crypto companies such as Binance and Coinbase, which are being sued by the SEC for violating laws. So Ripple is going to continue fighting. You guys know there's going to be even the proper party at the end of the month of September. And I'm looking forward to that in New York City. I will be attending. I know some people are down on it because the prices are down. But look, if you have to understand the market cycles, right, what's playing out, everything's down. Bitcoin is down. Even a large, large part of the markets out there because of the macroeconomic factors of inflation, rate hikes and much more. So I'm glad to see that Ripple is going to continue fighting and I'm sure they're going to push for some sort of settlement. And we know the SEC is trying to appeal, but, you know, Ripple took the bigger slice of the pie from a victory standpoint where XRP token was intrinsically stated as not being a security. And I think the judge got it right there. It goes back to how we test the orange groves and the oranges that we get at our supermarket or orange trees in general are not securities by themselves, but rather it's the packaging. So that's the key. So the tokens themselves, not securities is just how are they being packaged? And don't get me wrong, NFTs could be, and I say could be in certain circumstances, securities, right? If they're packaged in a certain way. But we know if you just simply issue artwork and NFTs on the blockchain, that does not make them intrinsically a security. But Gary Gensler, we know he doesn't. He's trying to muddy the waters and cause confusion and just saying everything that's issued is a security. We know it's nonsense. Now, moving ahead, Flare, many of you hold the Flare tokens. If you're an XRP holder who participated in the Flare snapshot, you got a distribution of your Flare tokens. You continue to get that. I personally am doing that and I delegate my Flare tokens and I'm earning rewards. I'm doing the same thing for Songbird. You can of course invest in the Flare token if you want. Well, Flare is going to be moving to a staking model and they provided an update here saying we will soon enter phase two of three in Flare's transition to a staking model, opening new opportunities to delegate stake to validators and earn rewards. The date when staking can commence will be announced in the coming weeks. So if you're a Flare token holder, this is great news and I'm looking forward to this. If I can stake and earn more rewards, that'll be great. And you know, I'm not selling any of the earnings I get from delegation because we're in a bear market. I am just delegating, earning more tokens, and then when the bull market comes, I will be looking to take profits as the prices rise. Now speaking of prices rising and selling, a great platform to do so is on Uphold, which is a great platform. I've been using them since 2018. They're one of my go -to exchanges. They have 10 plus million users, 250 plus cryptocurrencies, and they're available in 150 countries. You can also trade precious metals and equities and 37 national currencies. So that's different Fiat currencies, and you can swap easily between precious metals, cryptocurrencies, and these different 37 national currencies. So if you'd like to learn more about Uphold, please visit the link in the description. All right, folks, we got some very big Hedera HBAR news. So recently I interviewed Leemon Beard, who's one of the co -founders of Hedera. They're doing great things. I think this is going to be one of the blockchain projects that can really come out of this speculative crypto bubble and be one of the winners, right? If you look at the speculative bubble of the dot -com boom, you had your Googles, your Ebays, your Amazons, and a few others that came out that did really well. I think Hedera is one of them. And part of their governing council includes Google, Dell, IBM, Boeing, some of the biggest names. And just recently, Hyundai and Kia started building on the Hedera network. So huge news. So they tweeted out, we're excited to announce the Hedera stablecoin studio, the all -in -one stablecoin configuration issuance and management toolkit tailored for Web3 platforms, institutional issuers, enterprises, and payment providers alike. By leveraging Hedera, the network, and in collaboration with our partners, the stablecoin studio delivers a highly performant, seamless, and end -to -end stablecoin solution with proof of reserve, dedicated custodians, and network native KYC slash AML flagging. So this is pretty big. They said with Hedera, predictable fees, high programmability, and robust network of ecosystem partners, stablecoin issuance and management have never been simpler. Everything you need to build and configure stablecoins with ease. So this is a really great feature. Obviously, stablecoins are going to be a big part of the token economy and the ability to have your blockchain utilized for tokenization, whether it be CBDCs, stablecoins, NFTs, tokenization of real -world assets, and much more is going to be key to adoption because that's the future. So Hedera is ahead of the curve in many ways. And if you haven't seen my interview with Lehman Abir, be sure to check it out because we talk about the Hyundai -Kia situation. We talk about Xinhan Bank with their stablecoin on the Hedera blockchain being used to improve cross -border payments. So it's really, really big things happening here. I'm very bullish on HBAR. Now moving ahead, Coinbase, to integrate the Bitcoin Lightning Network in a bid to drive adoption, Coinbase CEO labeled Bitcoin the most important asset Tuesday following an announcement his company would integrate Lightning. Now Coinbase is a little bit late to the game here. There have been other exchanges like OKEx that integrated the Lightning Network. But more and more, I think, platforms are going to leverage the Lightning Network to help boost Bitcoin's ability to scale. Look, I don't think the Lightning Network is even there yet. We know the folks at Lightspark are trying to do something, Jack Mahler's strike, but it's not there. Look, Bitcoin is a great store of value, great hard money, great digital goal. I view it from that standpoint. And that's why I hold it in my portfolio. It has made me money. But for payments, not great. Not great at all. Now there could be great improvements to the Lightning Network where it gets global adoption and people start using it. But we are far from that. And we'll have to see what guys like Jack Dorsey's Cash App, David Marcus's Lightspark, Jack Mahler's strike, and these guys do because they've done it in small increments and small markets. But there's no major global adoption here where people are like, I'm going to go spend some sats. Don't get me wrong, it may be happening in, once again, small scenarios in El Salvador. But what about the rest of the world? People are opting more for stablecoins. So this is something that the folks who are building the Lightning Network have to figure out how to scale this thing and make it easy for people to onboard. So Coinbase looking to make a push here and get more adoption around Bitcoin, and it certainly makes sense. Bitcoin is definitely the brand that's well known. A lot of people come into the market via the Bitcoin asset, and then they usually go to altcoins after that. Now speaking of altcoins, Vitalik Buterin was speaking at Permissionless, the crypto conference in Austin. It's actually held by Blockworks. And he talked a bit about what's in the future for Ethereum. Now, some people listening to this may be very upset at Vitalik, Joe Lubin, Bill Hinman and so forth. And that's fine. You know, I understand I'm not the biggest fans of these folks as well. I do respect Vitalik as a coder and what he has built. I think folks can't ignore that. He did build a great platform. First mover advantage, the EVM is used by many other different blockchains. And there's been a lot of building on Ethereum. You can't deny that regardless if you hate it or you don't hold it. The facts are there from DeFi to NFTs and much more. And a lot of smart contract tech is being used and built around Ethereum. And he made some interesting statements as to what Ethereum is going to target next. So he said DeFi is cool. NFTs are a new primitive, but an extension of something that has a history and using crypto for payments is good, but also familiar. These are individual pieces that are designed to fit it into an ecosystem that's otherwise the same as before, Buterin said. He said what he's excited about is decentralized social, repeatedly name dropping Faircaster, a Twitter like protocol on the OP mainnet with a companion warp cast mobile app that is currently invite only alpha release. Along with Lens developed by Aave founder Stani Kulichov and running on Polygon's proof of stake chain, Faircaster and similar social experiences are using crypto tools to complete with centralized platforms. Let's see how far we can push things in that direction, Buterin said. But where I see the longer term feature here is it really can plug into all the other stuff that we've been doing as a space. So it sounds like he's trying to build like some sort of decentralized social platform that will include the tokenization, the entities, the DeFi and so forth. That makes sense. And as we head into Web3, just as people transition from Web1 to Web2 and even earlier versions of Web2 social platforms like Myspace and Friendster to eventually Facebook, Twitter and so on, we're going to see a transition from the Web2 social platforms into Web3 social platforms, especially as they become more easy to onboard and use. And there's a layer of rewards of tokens. And if people can legitimately earn tokens and get paid for their activity and it's on the block chain, it's verifiable, it's hard to hack and things like that. They will come folks. They will come. People will come, especially as data breaches continue with social platforms mainstream and other platforms as well. So interesting statements here from Vitalik. And I think we want to watch this closely because look, like I said, Ethereum has the adoption, has a lot of developers, has a lot of capital behind a lot of resources. So if there's any token that comes with these social platforms, I'm going to be looking into that and be looking into these platforms and seeing how I can capitalize on it to make a nice return. Well, folks, that's the news. Let me know what you think. Leave your thoughts and comments below. Hit the thumbs up button. Hit the five star rating on the podcast platforms. Don't forget to check out the merchandise store. Link will be in the description where you can buy the podcast branded gear as well as fire Gary Gensler T -shirts and hats and much more. Thank you for your support. And I'll talk to you all later. Bye bye.
The Breakdown
A highlight from The Senate Doesn't Seem to Care About Crypto Anymore
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, September 13th, and today we are talking about news that Binance US CEO has left the company. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, last night I had assumed that today's show would be some combination of Gary Gensler testifying before the Senate with maybe a little side of CPI. But then last night, new Binance news broke that had the whole community chattering. So that's where we're going to start. According to anonymous sources, Binance US CEO Brian Schroeder has left the company. Chief legal officer Norman Reed will step into the role on an interim basis. Alongside the resignation, Binance US announced internally that it will slash around one third of its workforce, laying off approximately 100 employees. This is the second round of layoffs for the US -based exchange as they dig in to fight legal battles against the SEC and the CFTC. Binance US said in a statement, Now, if you are paying attention, not even closely, just at all, you will know that this is the latest in a series of high -profile departures across the Binance empire. At least 11 executives have now resigned across all Binance companies. Three key personnel left on the same day in July, including front -facing Chief Strategy Officer Patrick Hillman, amid rumors of dissatisfaction with how Binance CEO CZ handled rumors of a DOJ investigation. Five more executives quit earlier this month, with the headline resignation coming from Leon Fung, the head of Asia -Pacific operations. In all cases, the resignations have been officially explained by a range of personal reasons, probably capstone by former compliance officer Steven Christie's extremely weird Twitter thread, which included the statement that, Now, the wide -ranging lawsuits against Binance have largely come home to roost for their US subsidiary. Both the SEC and CFTC cases include allegations that reach deep within the international Binance empire. However, regulators have been careful to focus their attention on Binance US to ensure that they have clear jurisdiction. A key focus of litigation so far has been the flow of funds between Binance US and the international organization. All of this means that the focus on the domestic exchange has led to the US subsidiary taking the brunt of the consequences so far. More acutely, Binance US was essentially cut off from all access to onshore banking, forcing them to operate as a crypto -only exchange. This shutdown of financial services has led to a dramatic collapse in trading volume. Binance US captured around 22 % of US market share in April, but this figure has now dropped below 1 % as traders quite reasonably flee to safer shores. Schroeder is now the third Binance US CEO to walk away from the role. Both Kathryn Coley and Brian Brooks, who earlier served as CEOs for the exchange, have provided extensive testimony to regulators and law enforcement. Schroeder joined the firm as president in September 2021, well into the company's claimed attempt to clean up their operations. One consequence of that could be that he has significantly less scandalous information on how the exchange functioned than other former executives. So what are the community's takes on this? Well, as you would expect, the anti -crypto folks are cheering. They see Binance as the next and perhaps ultimate shoe to drop. However, many folks in the industry, regardless of what they think of Binance, view it as a sad episode that shows just how problematic the SEC's approach really is. Wolf of All Street's host Scott Melker said, The SEC killed Binance US without proving a single thing, without due process. It simply took accusations to scare away customers and partners. This is the legacy of Gary Gensler. Another take which I resonate with strongly comes from folks like Byzantine General who wrote, I don't know why people are up in arms about this. I thought it was quite obvious already since the SEC lawsuit that Binance was just going to wind down operations of their US branch. It's so small and completely inconsequential to Binance anyway. Or more crisply from Icebergi, just closed down Binance US already. It has seemed untenable for quite some time and this only seems to reinforce that point of view. Now the other big generator of conversation was investor Adam Cochrane. He tweeted, I've been saying if Binance blows up, we'll be fine in no time. Got a tip that I've not yet been able to fully verify, but I would lean towards it being true on, and if it's true, it'll be a longer, more painful ride than I thought. Life behind bars would be the good outcome for CZ. I've sent that tip to some journalists I think can confirm if it's real and will keep folks updated if I get anything back. But in good faith I had to redact my will be fine stance and replace it with, we'll probably be okay unless this other part is real, in which case holy eff we're really going to zero and going to have to rebuild up again over time. Anyway, fun times in crypto. Now this certainly got people chattering, but not always in a good way. Zero Knowledge consulting partner and founder Austin Campbell quote tweeted it and said, If you have a financial interest in an outcome and post that you have a rumor without saying what the rumor is, you are part of the problem in this space. This would have been prohibited conduct in most regulated markets. I certainly would have gotten in trouble for this at JPM. Now, interestingly, however, 4Lex4Shaw had a different take. They wrote, It's all so tiresome. Binance had the support of dozens of governments from Singapore to UAE to every corner of the global south, and Tether too. The U .S. can't cut the UAE, Caymans, Bahamas, and Singapore out of Eurodollar markets, so it can't de -dollarize Binance. Any successful prosecution of Binance has to cut off Binance's access to USDT, cut Binance off from access to UAE, Singapore, etc., Eurodollars, or prove beyond a shadow of a doubt a huge hole in Binance's balance sheet, i .e. accounting fraud. Everything else is just low -budget theater. If the U .S. can accomplish one of those things, Binance is dead. If the U .S. can't, CZ doesn't have to give a crap about what the U .S. government says, indicts, or cajoles. The latter possibility breaks a lot of people's brains, but I don't make the rules. The interesting take here is, of course, that in many ways the Tether and Binance stuff going on is kind of just a proxy war for the U .S. about the U .S. government trying to exert sovereignty over the Eurodollar market that they simply don't control. I think it's a really interesting lens through which to look at these prosecution efforts, as well as questions around USD stablecoins. Anyways, who knows what happens next with Binance, but it continues to be the biggest open question in the entire space. Now, moving back over more officially to the U .S. government side of things, SEC Chair Gary Gensler appeared before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday at a routine oversight hearing. Now, coming into the hearing, Gensler reinforced his well -worn position on crypto and written testimony. He stated that, quote, Given this industry's wide -ranging noncompliance with the securities laws, it's not surprising that we've seen many problems in these markets. We've seen this story before. It's reminiscent of what we had in the 1920s before the federal securities laws were put in place. Brushing off the recent Ripple decision, Gensler asserted that, quote, The vast majority of crypto tokens likely meet the investment contract test. Given that most crypto tokens are subject to the securities laws, it follows that most crypto intermediaries have to comply with securities laws as well. Now, the hearing itself was kicked off by opening statements from Chairman Sherrod Brown. As the leading Democrat dealing with financial issues, any crypto legislation being moved forward in the near future would likely require Brown's seal of approval to become law. Judging from his comments about the state of the industry, that seems unlikely. Brown said, quote, The FTX collapse showed how dangerous crypto can be. But FTX wasn't a lone bad apple. It was just the most explosive example of the problems in crypto. The problems we saw at FTX are everywhere in crypto. The failure to provide real disclosure, the conflicts of interest, the risky bets with customer money that was supposed to be safe. FTX was just the biggest and the ugliest. For consumers, it adds up to billions of dollars gone. Bad actors keep flocking to crypto. They use it to launder money, to evade sanctions, to fund crime and human trafficking and terrorism. We need to protect workers and families in these markets. We need to clean up the scams and fraud. As Congress considers digital asset legislation, I'm glad the SEC is using its tool to crack down on abuse and enforce the law. Now, of course, a casual observer might suggest that 1. FTX was distinct, given that its former CEO is on trial for perpetrating fraud against his company, investors, partners and the public at large. And an observer might note that the SEC didn't use its tools to do anything about that or any of the other big examples of actual fraud and problems happening. Instead, it's wrote in after the fact to win settlements against projects too small to defend themselves and chalk it up as victories, which might, to some, be seen as much more politically motivated than actually driven by consumer protection. But that's just one take. Now, ranking Republican member Tim Scott used his opening comments to drag Gensler for his lack of engagement with congressional oversight. Scott noted that the Senate hasn't heard from Gensler since last September, despite the FTX collapse and several bank failures occurring in the interim. He said, complete and timely attention to congressional inquiries is critical to ensuring independent agencies remain transparent and accountable to the American people. Yet, sadly, your agency has fallen short in this obligation to be transparent and responsive to congressional oversight. Without pro -growth regulations, we are limiting opportunities for our kids and our kids' kids from being able to take control of their own financial futures. The American people have a right to know what their government is doing, and your agency's blatant refusal to respond to our constitutionally mandated oversight represents a dereliction of your duties to the American people. And yet, still, when all was said and done, the most striking thing about the hearing was just how much crypto had faded as a front -of -mind issue in Congress. Gensler didn't mention crypto at all in his brief oral testimony, and lawmakers had numerous more pressing concerns to discuss. Based on the questions, climate reporting rules and AI use and financial services ranked as much higher priority than crypto enforcement, even for previously fervent Democrats. We didn't even get the customary anti -crypto soundbite from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who instead used her time to rail against a perceived lack of toughness in new private equity disclosure rules. The crypto discussion, to the extent there was any, touched on pending crypto ETFs. Senator Bill Hagerty brought up the point that the SEC's rejection of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust had been labeled arbitrary and capricious by a federal judge. He asked what the SEC would need to see in order to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF, to which Gensler responded that the agency is, quote, "...still reviewing that decision and reviewing multiple filings around Bitcoin ETPs. I'm looking forward to staff's recommendations." Now, on top of some of those specifics, many GOP senators had more general criticisms for how Gensler's SEC had conducted itself. Senator Steve Daines, for example, complained that the SEC has frequently overreached its mandate in attempts to expand its jurisdiction. He suggested that 80 % of the SEC's rulemaking efforts under Gensler were not required by legislation. Daines said, "...this means that the vast majority of the agency's rulemaking agenda has been voluntarily undertaken. Chairman Gensler, you are not an elected official that is beholden to your constituents. You are an unelected bureaucrat who has taken it upon himself to reshape American markets to your liking, to the detriment of innovation, of investors, and small businesses." What's more, it seems like many in the Washington establishment are not just concerned about Gensler when it comes to the crypto markets. Earlier this week, for example, the Wall Street Journal published an op -ed article penned by former U .S. Attorney General Bill Barr. Specifically, the article warned of Gensler encroachment into regulating the use of AI. But Barr was scathing in his attack of Gensler's leadership at the SEC more broadly. He wrote, "...this is only the latest example of Mr. Gensler's grandiose regulatory style. He takes on airy theoretical issues and attacks them with broad prophylactic regulations that are long on speculation and paternalism, short on evidence and rational analysis, and heedless of Congress and the Constitution. He claims these measures will head off speculative evils, but they are more likely to throttle the dynamism of U .S. markets." So how are we to sum this all up and make sense of it? To me, this was very clearly the first hearing of the next election cycle. Crypto is now an afterthought for Congress. Or maybe better put, it is an exhibit and an example of a broader narrative which is around SEC overreach. It seems fairly clear that people aren't that interested in getting regulation done for the industry and even on the GOP side are more interested in defeating a broader political agenda embodied by Gensler. The big themes were agency overreach, major questions doctrine, and the role of unelected bureaucrats, not crypto per se. But to the extent that anyone is looking for good news as relates to the election cycle, as finance lawyer at Davis Polk Scott Johnson pointed out, for those keeping count, Senator Sherrod Brown's odds are about 60 % chance to lose his seat next year as of now. Change isn't always necessarily good, but it certainly opens up new possibilities. But gear up, because we are definitely in the election part of the cycle. Thanks as always for listening, and until next time, be safe and take care of each other.
The Charlie Kirk Show
A highlight from Swing State Update with Tyler Bowyer and Austin Smith
"Hey, feeling unsure about your finances these days? You're not alone. That's why Noble Gold Investments is here to help. Just hear it straight from the people who they've helped. The Noble crew walked me through everything with no stress. With their help, I could finally sleep easy at night. And now this month, Noble Gold Investments is handing out a free 5 -ounce silver America the Beautiful coin if you qualify for an IRA. Invest in gold and silver with Noble Gold Investments. Go to noblegoldinvestments .com right now. That is noblegoldinvestments .com right now. Hey everybody, a bonus episode this weekend. Conversation that I had with Austin Smith and Tyler Boyer for their podcast episode called Swing State Update. It comes out once a week. It's all about Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin. You guys should subscribe to the podcast. It's really great. I come on for a couple minutes here and they're doing it. Brought to you by Turning Point Action, tpaction .com. So subscribe to Swing State Update. Enjoy this conversation with Austin Smith and Tyler Boyer. And send us your thoughts. Freedom at charliekirk .com. Again, it's called Swing State Update. Give it a subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and make it a weekly listen. They do a great job. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. Charlie, what you've done is incredible here. Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campuses. I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks. I want to thank Charlie. He's an incredible guy. His spirit, his love of this country. He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country. That's why we are here. Welcome to episode number two of Swing State Update here with Tyler Boyer and Austin Smith, who is actually remote today in Wisconsin. Not just doing the work that's necessary in Wisconsin to win, but also celebrating his soon to be brother -in -law's wedding. So, Austin, you here? You here with us? I'm happy to be here. Episode two, and we've got the Charlie Kirk with us for Swing State Update. What's up, guys? Love the show. Love the success of it. Hopefully, we can pour some gasoline on it. And most importantly, I love the focus on the three states. I think we're finally getting people to wake up, and you guys are doing great on that. So thrilled to be here. So we want to lead off today with the great Charlie Kirk, who obviously we work together with every single day, out in the field, out in the trenches, trying to save the country, particularly in these three states that we're focused on predominantly, but all the swing states where Turning Point Action has been. And I want to preface this by saying this. When I met Charlie Kirk for the first time about a decade ago, which is a crazy thing to think about, right, Charlie? That's been a whole decade. You're pretty old. It's been 10 years. It's just really something. It's crazy. But when I first met Charlie, the thing about Charlie that most people get when they get a chance to meet him is they understand that he's a person that's actually doing these things for the right reasons. And I'll never forget the moment I met Charlie, actually not far from the border of Wisconsin, is negative 20 degrees outside. And it was literally freezing. The that coldest an Arizona boy could possibly be. And I remember meeting Charlie for the first time in person and going, wow, this is a person that I can get behind. This is a person that I can work with to actually do the things that are necessary to save the Republic. And I'll never forget that. And that's a really important moment. So with that preface here, we wanted to jump in, talk to Charlie, have a few minutes to talk about a number of different issues, but specifically what's happening here in Arizona, the battle that Charlie has helped ignite with Arizona State University. That's the most recent, which is such a pleasure. And from there, so Charlie, thanks for being here. Yeah, thank you, Tyler. I love doing stuff together. And Turning Point Action is becoming a beast, just so everyone in the audience knows. It's becoming a real beast, tpaction .com. Austin, you were our first hire at Turning Point Action. And just seeing what's happening, it's really great. And look, I get asked, we get asked all the time, Tyler and Austin, how do we save the country? How do we save the country? Look, our founding fathers gave us a gift, the Electoral College. We don't have to save Manhattan yet. We don't have to save Malibu yet. Seven counties, basically like precincts in three states, Arizona, Wisconsin, Georgia. And I think we are so focused. We are so with precision, really looking at how we make a difference. So yeah, look, honored to be here. And the Arizona thing is really fun coming up. Boy, what is the date? Is that the 27th? I think, right, Austin? Twenty seven. Yes. Twenty seventh. Yes, I have it right with Dennis Prager. I got so many dates at Arizona State University. We have Health, Wealth and Happiness 2 .0. The original, of course, we we came to ASU back in the spring and 30 professors signed all these letters saying that Prager and Kirk shouldn't be allowed on campus. And Austin, it turned in this whole fight legislatively, you know, at the Capitol. And now we're like, OK, we're coming back. And so I don't think Mr. Crow is very happy that we're coming back. But so be it. And it's really kind of turned into this major free speech thing, hasn't it, Austin? It's funny because so we were even, you know, in session when Charlie and Dennis Prager did the original health and wellness thing and everybody heard about it. The liberals on campus had their panties in a wad, all this stuff. And they're the racist, sexist, blah, blah, blah. Everything right now. And so actually, you know, staff got fired for it just by freedom of association. And so we had that whole ad hoc committee regarding freedom of expression at Arizona universities. I was on it, got appointed. I was one of three Republicans from the House, and we had Prager and some of these other people that were involved at ASU go do that committee at the House. And if you would be so shocked about how ASU and all these other universities, they just they flat out lie about how actually don't support free speech, freedom of expression, all that good stuff. So we're happy that Charlie and Dennis Prager are going back because it's going to be a lot more fun now that we know ASU is kind of on the ropes about it. And the Board of Regents have consistently, you know, said that we can't do anything about it. They're doing everything they need to. They're liars. It's going to be a good time. It's going to be a good time, and we're going to have fun. Austin, let's set this up for a minute, too, just to revamp. So for those of you that are across the country that don't know, Charlie and Dennis showed up to ASU to speak, invited by one of the official arms of ASU to do this event. It was the Lewis Center, which is actually supported by T .W. Lewis, who is one of the bigger home builders across the country. And T .W. Lewis is a conservative, is a person, at least a free speech supporter. And T .W. Lewis, Tom Lewis, I believe is his first name that supports the center at ASU, has given millions of dollars to universities and including a commitment, a gift that was planned on being a future hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars in the future. And as soon as this happened, you know, Charlie, I don't know if you, I think you recently sat down with Mr. Lewis. Did you not? Yeah. And we had a great chat. And he's pulled all this funding now from the university because of what happened back in the spring. And it was so outrageous. It wasn't just that the professor said that we don't like Dennis and Charlie. It's that we don't want them to be able to set foot on campus. And so, but so then we see you. Yeah. So then we put it to this. I haven't I actually never talked about this publicly. So this next part, you're going to love this, Tyler. So we put all the professors on professorwatchlist .org. And then I get a personal letter from Crow, the president of ASU saying, okay, we let you on campus. I demand you take all of our professors off professorwatchlist or else you or else or else you put me on. He says, or else you have to put me on. So I just was like, forget it. This is so stupid. So and so he's literally saying like, I demand you take off all of our because obviously all the professors were like going and complaining to him like, oh, we're complaining. We're complaining. You know, it's just it's just unbelievable. So wait. So we didn't put President Crow on professorwatchlist? No, no, not yet. We can we should. Yeah, you should do that.
The Breakdown
A highlight from UPDATED: How Big A Deal Are The Changes to Crypto Accounting Standards?
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, September 7th, and today we are asking how big a deal are new crypto accounting rules? Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on The Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Now, reiterating that point, I said this on my AI show as well, but today you are listening to a birthday episode. Yes, 39 years ago today I was born, and if you would like to give me a beautiful gift, leaving a rating or a review for this show wherever you happen to listen to it would be an awesome, awesome thing to do. I appreciate all of you listeners and participants, and so let's talk new crypto accounting rules. The Financial Accounting Standards Board, or FASB, have changed their recommendations for how crypto holdings should be recorded in corporate financial statements. The FASB oversees reporting and accounting standards for companies that follow generally accepted accounting principles or GAAP guidelines. On Wednesday, the FASB unanimously passed a vote to recommend fair value accounting for crypto assets held on corporate balance sheets. This means crypto will be marked at the prevailing market price in financial reporting. Previously, corporations were recommended to record impairment losses on their balance sheet when the price of crypto fell. This impairment was not removed if crypto prices recovered, making it difficult to quickly determine the value of corporate crypto holdings using this method. Michael Saylor, the chairman of MicroStrategy, has been railing against this recommended accounting for years, claiming that it made little sense it was misleading to investors. MicroStrategy and some other companies worked around this problem by providing an alternative accounting within their financial disclosures, which included the current fair value of crypto holdings. Now, the FASB kept the proposed changes simple and elected not to address NFTs, wrapped tokens, or stablecoins for now. Companies may begin using this method in their official accounting immediately, with the rules officially changing in 2025. FASB member Christine Bodasan said, It's not very often that we can both take cost out of the system and improve the decision usefulness of information, and it makes it a really easy vote to do both of those. Jeff Runlet, the head of accounting strategy at accounting software company Cryptio, said, It's a great step forward for the entire crypto market. I think it's a great step towards mainstream adoption. I can see finalizing this proposal to help large corporations that are maybe scared to hold crypto on their balance sheet because they're scared of the technical complexities. Now, by and large, the community greeted the news as something that was unlikely to cause big widespread attention, but which was quietly significant. Michael Saylor tweeted, Fair value accounting is coming to Bitcoin. This upgrade to FASB accounting rules eliminates a major impediment to corporate adoption of Bitcoin as a treasury asset. Stack Hodler says, Huge FASB votes in favor of fair value accounting for Bitcoin on corporate balance sheets. Most public corporations couldn't stack Bitcoin without this rule change. Now, cash rich companies have a way to ensure their bond portfolios against debasement. Dr. Chris Dark said, They voted unanimously to change the rules to fair value accounting, which is logical by the end of the year. FASB rule change for crypto matters for corporates a lot. It's boring and wonky, but it fixes one of the most silly accounting rules where it was an indefinite lived intangible asset. TLDR, corporates will be able to hold Bitcoin or ETH or crypto, and in quarterly accounts it will be valued at its fair value, not by the current rules, which is at its purchase cost minus impairment. Genuinely big news that no one will care much about. Well, Dr. Dark, we care about it here at The Breakdown. Next up, another bit of news along the same theme of institutionalization, which really one could joke, pretty reasonably, that the perpetual bull narrative in crypto is institutions just around the corner. Anyway, a pair of asset managers filed applications for Spot Ethereum ETFs on Wednesday. ARK, in partnership with 21Shares as well as VanEck, will try their luck to get the first of their kind products approved by the SEC. Now a reminder about process, once the regulator acknowledges the applications, that will start the clock on a 240 -day deadline for a final SEC decision. The first interim deadline for the regulator comes after 45 days, and these Spot ETH filings join 16 existing applications for products offering exposure to Ethereum futures. Now if you want a little more insight into 21Shares and their parent 21 .co, go check out my interview with CEO Hani Rashwan on Bitcoin Builders. We talk about how much the company and the industry has changed since they got their first -ever crypto exchange -traded product approved in December of 2018. Now back to this news, both of the applications filed on Wednesday featured a surveillance sharing agreement with Coinbase. This feature is intended to monitor Spot crypto markets for manipulation and has been seen as a key difference in the latest round of Spot Bitcoin ETF applications. Coinbase will also serve as the custodian for the ARK 21Shares ETF, although VanEck has not yet named a custodian. Up until now, the SEC has always summarily requested the withdrawal of Spot ETF applications. And yet, Grayscale's recent courtroom win has been widely viewed as making the SEC's continued rejection of Spot crypto ETFs for major tokens, if not untenable, then certainly at least on borrowed time. One of the key rulings is that there was no fundamental difference between how futures -based and spot -based ETFs should be considered, given that the markets are 99 % correlated. When all is said and done, Bloomberg analysts expect additional Spot ETH ETF applications to pour in over the rest of the week. Bloomberg analyst James Safard tweets, The Spot Ethereum ETF race is officially on. It's early, but I'd estimate a final deadline on these applications to be around May 23, 2024. Now, all the same, many crypto traders noticed that, once again, a bullish piece of news had basically no impact on price. ETH pumped an anemic 2 % on the news and then fully retraced. Based Carbon tweeted, We used to pump coins harder on fake Grayscale trust filings than we did on a real ETH ETF filing. Still, I think analyst Ilo has it when they write, Price action still looks like it's going to be bleak in the short term. No liquidity, no volume, everything basically dead. But 2024 is shaping up like this. Approved ETH futures and spot ETFs, hard to ask for a better setup. You get to buy the lows before all the flows are with us again. Shoot your shot. However, because we are in this in -between moment, that means that any day that has a bunch of good news is also going to have, if not bad news, then at least news of the cleanup and fallout of last year. On that front, bankrupt crypto lender Genesys have sued parent company Digital Currency Group for payment of over $620 million in loans, which came due in May. These loans have been at the center of the Genesys bankruptcy, with allegations that they were made in an attempt to paper over problems within the DCG empire after the collapse of Three Arrows Capital in May of last year. And yet, despite their notoriety, relatively little has been known about the details of these loans until this lawsuit was filed. According to the complaint, Genesys loaned DCG almost 19 ,000 Bitcoin in June 2022 under the terms of an open loan agreement first signed in 2019. In November, the loan was converted to a fixed term due on May 11th this year. The filing states that the loan was partially repaid with a balance of 4 ,550 .5 Bitcoin outstanding. The two parties underwent mediation, which ended in August, but continued to negotiate. According to a separate document also filed on Wednesday, Genesys extended four cash loans to DCG throughout 2022 worth a total of $500 million. DCG claimed that it was able to convert the loans back to open term loans under the prior agreement, but Genesys disagreed. Genesys is seeking the repayment of principal without late fees. Now, it's unlikely that this lawsuit will move forward anytime soon, as Genesys has stayed the court process. A DCG spokesperson said, Genesys has agreed to stay the turnover action so that we can move forward with documenting the deal in principle that was reached with Genesys, the Unsecured Creditors Committee, and DCG. We are documenting a forbearance agreement and expect to file it with the court shortly. At that point, we will initiate the distribution of funds and continue on the path to significant recovery for Genesys creditors. Now, you'll remember that this in -principle agreement was filed in late August and promised repayment of 70 -90 % on unsecured creditor claims. The deal was widely panned as a bad deal by commentators, and Gemini, who are the largest creditor in the Genesys bankruptcy, do not support the agreement. Roe Rider tweets, SEC needed a new reason to deny Grayscale ETF. Well, they just got it. Pending litigation against a parent company from lenders involving substantial underlying shares and assets is all the excuse they'll need. DCG can only hide behind its entity structure for so long. Now, one more smaller side story staying in the DCG world. Arkham Intelligence believes that they have identified a Bitcoin wallet cluster belonging to Grayscale. The on -chain tracking platform has flagged over 1 ,750 wallet addresses linked to Grayscale's Bitcoin trust holdings. Each wallet holds less than 1 ,000 Bitcoin worth around $25 .7 million. In total, the wallet cluster sums to $16 .1 billion in Bitcoin holdings, matching Grayscale's public disclosures. Arkham did not disclose the full list of wallet addresses. In addition to the Bitcoin wallets, though, Arkham has also identified Grayscale wallets containing other assets including $4 .9 billion in ETH. Moving on to other Fallout stories. The assets of former Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky have been frozen according to a court order unsealed on Wednesday. The order was originally issued on August 16th, and the list of assets included accounts held with Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and SoFi Bank, as well as a property in Austin, Texas. It included assets held in the name of companies Koala LLC and AM Ventures Holdings, as well as in the personal names of Alex Mashinsky and his wife Christine. Financial institutions are no longer permitted to facilitate transactions to and from the listed accounts. Mashinsky was of course arrested in July in relation to criminal fraud charges surrounding his operation of Celsius. Prosecutors claim Mashinsky defrauded customers and lied about Celsius's profitability. Mashinsky has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges, which his lawyers have called baseless. He was released on bail after posting a $40 million bond. Mashinsky also faces civil lawsuits from the SEC, the CFTC, and the Federal Trade Commission. Over in FTX world, SPF's request for immediate release from jail has been rejected, pending appeal. Sam is currently appealing a decision to revoke his bail made last month by the Federal Circuit Judge assigned to his criminal case. The Court of Appeals denied a motion for immediate release on Wednesday, but will hear the appeal before a panel of three judges at the next available opportunity, although it's unclear how long that will take. Now, Sam's trial is set to begin in less than four weeks. Defense attorneys have been protesting Sam's lack of access to a suitable laptop to review volumes of evidence, which have been disclosed by prosecutors in discovery. They've complained of low -quality internet access on a laptop with insufficient battery life when Sam is brought to the courthouse to look over documents in a holding cell. But according to a joint letter filed by the DOJ on Tuesday, Sam now has an upgraded battery and access to the laptop seven days a week, with copies of the discovery documents downloaded to hard drives. The letter also claimed that the internet access provided is sufficient for most internet review activities. Sam's defense team has until the close of this week to apply for a delayed start to the trial on account of the claimed difficulty accessing documents. That said, during a hearing last week, the judge made no indication of whether they were likely to grant a delay on the information currently disclosed. Now, earlier this morning, Bloomberg also reported that Ryan Salem was going to be pleading guilty, but as of recording, we don't have more info as to what, so we'll have to circle back to that later this week. Lastly today, tornado cash developer Roman Storm was arraigned on Wednesday. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to operate a money transmitter, facilitate money laundering, and sanctions evasion. Storm was released on a $2 million personal recognizance bond secured by his residence in Washington state immediately after his arrest last month. The tornado cash co -founder will remain on house arrest with limited travel allowed in central California, as well as to New York and New Jersey to attend court hearings. A Russian passport was seized from Storm who maintains dual citizenship. Fellow tornado cash co -founder Alexei Perseve is facing similar charges in the Netherlands and remains on house arrest awaiting his trial, and a third co -founder Roman Semenov has been charged by the DOJ but remains at large. Authorities allege the trio knowingly facilitated over $1 billion in money laundering through tornado cash without mitigating its illegal use. Tornado cash was for a time believed to be the primary money laundering system used by notorious North Korean hackers the Lazarus Group. Storm's lawyer, considered one of the top criminal defense attorneys in the crypto legal community, has said that authorities are In that, this case will be much more significant than just whether this set of people happen to do wrong. Anyways friends, that is going to do it for this birthday edition of The Breakdown. I appreciate you listening as always. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other.
The Breakdown
A highlight from The IMF Finally Realizes You Can't Ban Crypto
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, N .L .W. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, September 8th, and today we are wrapping up the week with a little bit of discussion of some new guidance about how crypto is not going to be successfully banned, as well as a new paper on privacy that's generating a lot of conversation. But before that, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it. Give it a rating, give it a review. Or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends. Happy Friday. Today we are rounding out the week with a number of different stories across the industry and we're kicking off with something that I think everyone who is in this industry knows intuitively, but which is finally being recognized from the outside in as well. The International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board have just released a new paper called Policies for Crypto Assets. The abstract reads, crypto assets have been in existence for more than a decade and have displayed significant volatility. Alongside their volatility, crypto asset activities have also grown in complexity. So far, direct connections between crypto assets and systemically important financial institutions, core financial markets, and market infrastructures have been limited. Nevertheless, they have the potential to emerge as a source of systemic risk in specific jurisdictions if they gain traction for payments or retail investments. This is something we've heard from this set of international institutions quite a bit. Basically that crypto isn't that risky now because it's not really fully integrated into the existing financial system, but that should it get integrated into that system, it could indeed create a number of risks. We've seen this language, for example, quite a bit from the Bank for International Settlements and particularly around areas such as stablecoins. Now, this is a big overarching paper. Back to the abstract again, it reads, at the request of the Indian G20 presidency, the IMF and the FSB have developed this paper to synthesize the IMF and the FSB's policy recommendations and standards. The collective recommendations provide comprehensive guidance to help authorities address the macroeconomic and financial stability risks posed by crypto asset activities and markets, including those associated with stablecoins and those conducted through so -called decentralized finance. As you heard from that, the paper was commissioned by the G20. Currently, the leadership of that organization is India and is set to be presented at a meeting of the G20 this weekend. The headline taken away by CoinDesk and many of the other crypto outlets out there is that the paper basically says that blanket crypto bans just will not work. According to the report, quote, imposing blanket bans that make all crypto activities, including trading and mining, illegal in one jurisdiction is not only expensive and technically challenging, but could also lead to activity migrating to other jurisdictions, creating spillover risks. This is, again, something that we know really intuitively. When you ban mining in one place, you're really just saying you're banning companies in your jurisdiction from mining. Now, this language echoes things that we've heard from the IMF before. In June, in a blog post about central bank digital currencies in Latin America and the Caribbean, the IMF wrote, Now, hold aside any cynicism. I do think the world would look a lot better if governments were recognizing why people wanted to get out of their monetary systems and try to address those issues. And yet I believe many of us here don't really think that that is a particularly plausible thing to happen. So what does this new report suggest instead of these blanket bans? Well, it says that the first line of defense against the macroeconomic and financial risks posed by crypto assets are robust macroeconomic policies, credible institutional frameworks and comprehensive regulation and oversight. That said, quote, Coinbase sums up the IMF and FSB say jurisdictions might consider targeted and temporary restrictions to manage some risk factors in stressful times or while countries find better internal fixes. The examples that the paper gave included targeted restrictions on privacy coins in places like Dubai, as well as a ban on Nigerian banks servicing crypto firms. Now, once again, as we've seen before, these international institutions are really concerned about stable coins. The paper says rapid capital flight or reversals could materialize if foreign currency denominated stable coins became easier and cheaper to hold in large quantities relative to foreign currency bank accounts. They say that global stable coins that are adopted by multiple jurisdictions, quote, may transmit volatility more abruptly than crypto assets and may cause significant risk to financial stability. So overall, there is nothing shocking or crazy new in this paper. Instead, I think it's a reflection of where the discourse is with these big international institutions right now. Grudgingly, they are accepting that crypto is here to stay and are recognizing that their time is probably better spent trying to help member governments figure out how to mitigate the worst risks rather than entertaining some fantasy of blocking it out entirely. Now, of course, as you heard, one of the ways in which they might look to do that, or at least one of the examples that was given, was targeted restrictions on things like privacy coins. Privacy in the crypto asset space has been particularly contentious, especially as global regulations and the fad of travel rule get more deeply implemented. And in general, the more that crypto comes into the Bank Secrecy Act sort of regulatory apparatus. Obviously, one of the things that we have talked about a huge amount on this show has been the tornado cash sanctions and then criminal accusations against the founders. And I think that that's part and parcel of this process of figuring out how crypto integrates with the larger system. On that front, a really interesting paper came out this week that was notable in part for who wrote it. One of the authors being Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, and for its exploration of this particular question, i .e. whether you can bring privacy to a protocol without it just becoming another tornado cash. The paper was titled Blockchain Privacy and Regulatory Compliance, Towards a Practical Equilibrium. Its authors include Vitalik Buterin, who I just mentioned, Jacob Ilham of Chainalysis, as well as supporting authors including Fabian Schar, and Matthias Nadler, as well as Amin Soleimani. It proposes a similar system to existing mixers like tornado cash, but that have built -in protections against money laundering. The proposed protocol would allow users to deposit funds to be mixed within a shared pool. Users could then withdraw funds to a fresh wallet, severing the link between wallets — in other words, basic mixer functionality to provide privacy to users. The twist is that the protocol would use zero -knowledge proofs to allow users to prove that their funds came from a particular set of deposits. By restricting the ability to deposit into these pools to users who can provide a known legal source of funds, the protocol can ensure that no illicit funds are mixed. The paper's abstract says that The paper goes on to explain that Now, the proposal builds on prior comments from Vitalik where he stated that tornado cash was a good privacy solution, but had limited options to disassociate between deposits from good actors and bad actors on the network. Vitalik's opinion is that the regulatory crackdowns on the illicit use of crypto networks are inevitable, and so the industry should be proactive in demonstrating that compliant privacy tools can be built. The paper argues that if the privacy -enhancing protocol enables its users to prove certain properties regarding the origin of their funds. Introducing the paper, Amin wrote, The importance of this paper is difficult to overstate. As crypto builds toward a world where financial intermediaries are optional, it is also our responsibility to engage regulators and implement new compliance tools designed for self -custody. So what were people's responses to this? Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi says, They could still generate low -quality or stale whitelist proofs. Is that enough to satisfy the DOJ's bar for compliance? Note that tornado cash had a compliance tool that allowed any user to prove their chain of custody to a third party, such as to an exchange or law enforcement. They also blocked sanctioned addresses from the front end. Even when blocking OFAC -sanctioned addresses from the front end and implementing this ability for depositors to prove their provenance, the DOJ concluded that they were nevertheless liable for how tornado was being used by Lazarus Group. All that said, obviously there are other facts to the tornado case. And I'm not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice. And there are a lot of cool ideas in this paper. But I'm not sure this is going to be a sufficient improvement from the perspective of the DOJ. So basically Haseeb is saying lots of cool stuff in here. But if the question is whether the US government is cool with this, he remains skeptical. Interestingly, Austin Campbell responded and said, Now, another line of conversation is that this is way too much compromise when it comes to critical issues of privacy. Matt Corallo tweets, Now, Matt's post did a great job of pinpointing a key critique and getting people to respond to that. A lot of the discussion in the comments then becomes about what compromise people should be willing to take. Masari's Ryan Selkis responds, Scott Lewis writes, I think it makes more sense to go halfway first. The next best competitor is a CBDC run on one computer by the government. Isolating crypto too aggressively will leave the entire global citizenry in a much worse place. We have to be pragmatic if we want to win. Rainier Stiles Grant toes a middle line saying, Now, there is a ton to debate in here, and debate the community certainly has. Some questions are extremely political. Whether one thinks there should be any compromises in this area, or whether cypherpunks need to keep fighting for true privacy when it comes to transactions. Some are really excited and engaged that there are pragmatic solutions being offered by people from within the industry. Others are pointing out specific technical problems, and in some cases recommending different approaches. Ultimately, I find myself agreeing with Bill Hughes when he writes, However, that is going to do it for today's episode. I appreciate you guys listening as always. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other.
The Breakdown
A highlight from How Big A Deal Are The Changes to Crypto Accounting Standards?
"Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, N .L .W. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Friday, September 8th, and today we are wrapping up the week with a little bit of discussion of some new guidance about how crypto is not going to be successfully banned, as well as a new paper on privacy that's generating a lot of conversation. But before that, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it. Give it a rating, give it a review. Or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit .ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends. Happy Friday. Today we are rounding out the week with a number of different stories across the industry and we're kicking off with something that I think everyone who is in this industry knows intuitively, but which is finally being recognized from the outside in as well. The International Monetary Fund and the Financial Stability Board have just released a new paper called Policies for Crypto Assets. The abstract reads, crypto assets have been in existence for more than a decade and have displayed significant volatility. Alongside their volatility, crypto asset activities have also grown in complexity. So far, direct connections between crypto assets and systemically important financial institutions, core financial markets, and market infrastructures have been limited. Nevertheless, they have the potential to emerge as a source of systemic risk in specific jurisdictions if they gain traction for payments or retail investments. This is something we've heard from this set of international institutions quite a bit. Basically that crypto isn't that risky now because it's not really fully integrated into the existing financial system, but that should it get integrated into that system, it could indeed create a number of risks. We've seen this language, for example, quite a bit from the Bank for International Settlements and particularly around areas such as stablecoins. Now, this is a big overarching paper. Back to the abstract again, it reads, at the request of the Indian G20 presidency, the IMF and the FSB have developed this paper to synthesize the IMF and the FSB's policy recommendations and standards. The collective recommendations provide comprehensive guidance to help authorities address the macroeconomic and financial stability risks posed by crypto asset activities and markets, including those associated with stablecoins and those conducted through so -called decentralized finance. As you heard from that, the paper was commissioned by the G20. Currently, the leadership of that organization is India and is set to be presented at a meeting of the G20 this weekend. The headline taken away by CoinDesk and many of the other crypto outlets out there is that the paper basically says that blanket crypto bans just will not work. According to the report, quote, imposing blanket bans that make all crypto activities, including trading and mining, illegal in one jurisdiction is not only expensive and technically challenging, but could also lead to activity migrating to other jurisdictions, creating spillover risks. This is, again, something that we know really intuitively. When you ban mining in one place, you're really just saying you're banning companies in your jurisdiction from mining. Now, this language echoes things that we've heard from the IMF before. In June, in a blog post about central bank digital currencies in Latin America and the Caribbean, the IMF wrote, Now, hold aside any cynicism. I do think the world would look a lot better if governments were recognizing why people wanted to get out of their monetary systems and try to address those issues. And yet I believe many of us here don't really think that that is a particularly plausible thing to happen. So what does this new report suggest instead of these blanket bans? Well, it says that the first line of defense against the macroeconomic and financial risks posed by crypto assets are robust macroeconomic policies, credible institutional frameworks and comprehensive regulation and oversight. That said, quote, Coinbase sums up the IMF and FSB say jurisdictions might consider targeted and temporary restrictions to manage some risk factors in stressful times or while countries find better internal fixes. The examples that the paper gave included targeted restrictions on privacy coins in places like Dubai, as well as a ban on Nigerian banks servicing crypto firms. Now, once again, as we've seen before, these international institutions are really concerned about stable coins. The paper says rapid capital flight or reversals could materialize if foreign currency denominated stable coins became easier and cheaper to hold in large quantities relative to foreign currency bank accounts. They say that global stable coins that are adopted by multiple jurisdictions, quote, may transmit volatility more abruptly than crypto assets and may cause significant risk to financial stability. So overall, there is nothing shocking or crazy new in this paper. Instead, I think it's a reflection of where the discourse is with these big international institutions right now. Grudgingly, they are accepting that crypto is here to stay and are recognizing that their time is probably better spent trying to help member governments figure out how to mitigate the worst risks rather than entertaining some fantasy of blocking it out entirely. Now, of course, as you heard, one of the ways in which they might look to do that, or at least one of the examples that was given, was targeted restrictions on things like privacy coins. Privacy in the crypto asset space has been particularly contentious, especially as global regulations and the fad of travel rule get more deeply implemented. And in general, the more that crypto comes into the Bank Secrecy Act sort of regulatory apparatus. Obviously, one of the things that we have talked about a huge amount on this show has been the tornado cash sanctions and then criminal accusations against the founders. And I think that that's part and parcel of this process of figuring out how crypto integrates with the larger system. On that front, a really interesting paper came out this week that was notable in part for who wrote it. One of the authors being Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, and for its exploration of this particular question, i .e. whether you can bring privacy to a protocol without it just becoming another tornado cash. The paper was titled Blockchain Privacy and Regulatory Compliance, Towards a Practical Equilibrium. Its authors include Vitalik Buterin, who I just mentioned, Jacob Ilham of Chainalysis, as well as supporting authors including Fabian Schar, and Matthias Nadler, as well as Amin Soleimani. It proposes a similar system to existing mixers like tornado cash, but that have built -in protections against money laundering. The proposed protocol would allow users to deposit funds to be mixed within a shared pool. Users could then withdraw funds to a fresh wallet, severing the link between wallets — in other words, basic mixer functionality to provide privacy to users. The twist is that the protocol would use zero -knowledge proofs to allow users to prove that their funds came from a particular set of deposits. By restricting the ability to deposit into these pools to users who can provide a known legal source of funds, the protocol can ensure that no illicit funds are mixed. The paper's abstract says that The paper goes on to explain that Now, the proposal builds on prior comments from Vitalik where he stated that tornado cash was a good privacy solution, but had limited options to disassociate between deposits from good actors and bad actors on the network. Vitalik's opinion is that the regulatory crackdowns on the illicit use of crypto networks are inevitable, and so the industry should be proactive in demonstrating that compliant privacy tools can be built. The paper argues that if the privacy -enhancing protocol enables its users to prove certain properties regarding the origin of their funds. Introducing the paper, Amin wrote, The importance of this paper is difficult to overstate. As crypto builds toward a world where financial intermediaries are optional, it is also our responsibility to engage regulators and implement new compliance tools designed for self -custody. So what were people's responses to this? Dragonfly managing partner Haseeb Qureshi says, They could still generate low -quality or stale whitelist proofs. Is that enough to satisfy the DOJ's bar for compliance? Note that tornado cash had a compliance tool that allowed any user to prove their chain of custody to a third party, such as to an exchange or law enforcement. They also blocked sanctioned addresses from the front end. Even when blocking OFAC -sanctioned addresses from the front end and implementing this ability for depositors to prove their provenance, the DOJ concluded that they were nevertheless liable for how tornado was being used by Lazarus Group. All that said, obviously there are other facts to the tornado case. And I'm not a lawyer, so this is not legal advice. And there are a lot of cool ideas in this paper. But I'm not sure this is going to be a sufficient improvement from the perspective of the DOJ. So basically Haseeb is saying lots of cool stuff in here. But if the question is whether the US government is cool with this, he remains skeptical. Interestingly, Austin Campbell responded and said, Now, another line of conversation is that this is way too much compromise when it comes to critical issues of privacy. Matt Corallo tweets, Now, Matt's post did a great job of pinpointing a key critique and getting people to respond to that. A lot of the discussion in the comments then becomes about what compromise people should be willing to take. Masari's Ryan Selkis responds, Scott Lewis writes, I think it makes more sense to go halfway first. The next best competitor is a CBDC run on one computer by the government. Isolating crypto too aggressively will leave the entire global citizenry in a much worse place. We have to be pragmatic if we want to win. Rainier Stiles Grant toes a middle line saying, Now, there is a ton to debate in here, and debate the community certainly has. Some questions are extremely political. Whether one thinks there should be any compromises in this area, or whether cypherpunks need to keep fighting for true privacy when it comes to transactions. Some are really excited and engaged that there are pragmatic solutions being offered by people from within the industry. Others are pointing out specific technical problems, and in some cases recommending different approaches. Ultimately, I find myself agreeing with Bill Hughes when he writes, However, that is going to do it for today's episode. I appreciate you guys listening as always. Until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other.
Real Estate Coaching Radio
A highlight from Real Estate Agents Proven Plan How To Make (at least) $100k In 100 Days! (Part 3)
"Welcome to Real Estate Coaching Radio, starring award -winning real estate coaches and number one international bestselling authors, Tim and Julie Harris. This is the number one daily radio show for realtors looking for a no BS, authentic, real time coaching experience. What's really working in today's market, how to generate more leads, make more money and have more time for what you love in your life. And now your hosts, Tim and Julie Harris. Welcome back. Today is part three of how to make a hundred thousand, well, at least a hundred thousand dollars. That's right. In the next a hundred days. So if you've not listened to the first two parts, please go back and listen to them. They are labeled correctly. Same title. And one says, guess what? Part one. The next one says part two. Make sure you're listening to these sequential shows that we do because we really do try to build one on top of the other. And the sequential shows actually take a heck of a lot more work to write. They do indeed. Yes. Speaking of writing, our notes for today's podcast are below. Just scroll down. You'll see the actual notes that we're using. And obviously Julie and I embellish them a lot as we start telling our stories and yeah, so they're down below. So scroll down below. Whether you're on Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, I think we're on 30 or 40 different podcast listing platforms or on Google or on just everything you can possibly imagine. This is the number one listen to daily podcast for real estate professionals in America. So yeah, we're everywhere. But scroll down, read the notes and follow along with us. And by the way, when you are reading the notes, one of the first things you'll notice is an easy way for you to join Premier Coaching. It costs you nothing and you can have immediate access to the first 30 days of Premier Coaching. And that does include a daily semi -private coaching call. What a perfect time of year right now for you to join Premier Coaching. So positively absolutely scroll down, read the notes, click the link, join Premier Coaching. If you are driving around and you don't want to scroll down, but you can't send a text, you can always text the word Premier to 47372. You can always just text the word Premier to 47372 and you will also be able to join Premier Coaching that way. And remember when texting message and data rates may apply. So you have two options, one just scroll down and click the link, join, or two just text the word Premier to 47372. Alright Julie, let's jump in right where we left off yesterday with point number seven. Yes and we'll be presenting a total of six ways for you to get to or exceed that $100 ,000 in 100 days. And before we get to point number seven, again this is the third part so get caught up if you missed the first two sections here, I have a quick shout out to many of our Premier Coaching members as well as nearly all of our elite coaching members who already have at least $100 ,000 in their pipeline. So if that's you and you're listening, why not add an additional $100 ,000 to your pipeline over the next 100 days and perhaps have your best quarter ever? So that's a little challenge for them. That's a fantastic suggestion because it really goes to the fact that in this market, what you're experiencing today, this is true in all markets but this one in particular, what you're experiencing today as far as financial abundance and as far as deal flow and financial security and all these types of things that everyone wants, if you're experiencing an abundance of that or a scarcity of that, it is all due to what you were doing 90 to maybe 120 days ago. That's a normal market cycle but in this one it's probably more like six months ago. Because a lot of times what happens is even if you get an absolutely top tier, perfect wonderful buyer, there just isn't enough for them to choose from and so they're going to take longer to purchase something than normal unless of course you take them to new construction which is our next point. But the moral of the story is that you're going to have to start getting in the habit of thinking about how you can take care of you in six months. Think in terms of what is it that the future version of you will be celebrating the current version of you for having done. Think like that. Never stop thinking like that. It's interesting also, I think, Julie and I have done some podcasts on this. Humans have and you've done most of the research so you can backfill one of my gaps. Humans have an inability to actually project themselves into the future in terms of actually visualizing what they're going to be experiencing but we can almost, with a complete 4D clarity, think back into the past. It's very hard for someone to think of anything other than just living for the moment. That's how we're all seemingly hardwired but we can't easily go back and think about the hardships from the past or obviously the wins from the past. But you're going to have to get disciplined with thinking and putting yourself into the future, especially in a market like this where the sales trajectory is a little bit slower. That's right. It's funny that we can remember with clarity into the past that probably a human survival technique based on a lot of the stuff I read, psychologists actually studied your brain waves and your brain functionality looking into the future. They said, imagine Tim five years from now and then they studied that versus other thoughts that they put into people's heads and what they found was when you're imagining anything about a year to more than that, your brain looks exactly like it does when you're asked to imagine a stranger. It's like it's totally foreign to you. You mean when they're doing like scans. Yeah, when they're doing scans and so the conclusion was it is probably because we can think about present pretty well and maybe even tomorrow and the next day. That's kind of a survival technique and we refer to the past to try and make those comparisons. Well, if I did it that way then I'm going to get this result and yet the future seems to be such a hard thing to do. And really one of the things, when Julie and I were, though we weren't, I think is articulate and certainly Julie didn't have all this research done back when we were in our twenties, we are absolutely terrible at projecting ourselves into the future and really all, it's almost impossible in modern society not to, I think be seduced into living for the moment for sure. Yeah. But what we would do is we would game ourselves and we were, for example, in our twenties we were starting to buy rental properties and we would try to have ourselves in contract on a rental property pretty much at all times and make it so that we had to save the money for the down payment and so we were always forcing ourselves to be broke so the money that we would have otherwise spent on having a hell of a lot more fun, frankly, in our formal years, we were putting that money towards buying rental properties and I cannot tell you how happy we are now that we actually had that discipline. Did we do it year in and year out? No, but we did it more often than we didn't and that's the same discipline that we've put towards a lot of other things as we've gone forward because, frankly, we're like everybody else. If we do not have widgets and wadgets in place to force us to do it, we don't want to do it, we don't want to do it at the highest level, we won't do it and so just, I want you to hopefully realize that there's nothing wrong with you if you're not liking your financial situation presently because it's just simply for the fact that you need to start realizing that there's momentum. There's two types of momentum, positive momentum and negative momentum and you might, some of you, as Julie pointed out, a lot of our coaching clients are experiencing amazing high levels of positive momentum. You're making more money, having more success, you're having an amazing year and others of you are the exact opposite. It's all because of what you were doing in the past and so if you're not experiencing great momentum right now and any important health, wealth, education, all the things that matter to you, you just got to start pushing that rock up the mountain ever so slowly and over time you're going to start seeing the benefits of that. That's just unfortunately the way life works. I wish there were shortcuts, I wish there were easy buttons, I wish there was some secret that all of us could just learn and make it so that we could just get what we want today but it doesn't work like that. Well, we're helping them with some of those secrets on this podcast series because instead of guessing and wandering around in the wilds of real estate and speculating, trying things out, waiting for results to come in as many things are in real estate, instead we're giving you the drilled down point by point how to actually make $100 ,000 at least, adjust accordingly in the next 100 days or less. So point number seven, how are you going to go about doing this? Well, point number seven, small and medium sized builders who are building homes on spec. Well what does that mean? This means they are speculating, that's where that word comes from, that the house that their building will sell. There are many iterations of this, all of which we teach you in Premier Coaching, we've also had podcasts about new construction, but what's working for our clients lately is to identify buildable lots and take them to the small builder. You sell them the lot, you list the spec home, you sell the spec home, you can even bring the buyer and then you lather, rinse, repeat. There's lots of different versions of this from normal single family stuff to small multi -families, lots of action in new construction and I was just listening to a podcast about new construction this morning where they're just charting, you know, builder sentiment is through the roof right now as a result of higher interest rates and lower inventory in the resale market. So if you're not having conversations with builders, really of all size, small, medium, large, track home, luxury, then you're missing out on at least 30 % of the opportunity that's there now. Well Julie and I are involved in a development of a new condo development near downtown Austin, Texas. I don't even remember how many units, is it 50 or something? I think so. 60 or 60, yeah. And if you were looking at the pictures and I posted some of those pictures on Instagram, it's at Tim and Julie Harris, you'll see these are basically going to be, I think, deliverable maybe yet this year if not into early next year. And that's going to be a lot of inventory that most agents don't know about because those aren't in the MLS and there's no marketing and advertising that's being done for those. If you're in Austin, you're looking for a beautiful condo that's going to be near downtown, just message me on Instagram and I'll connect you with our exp royalty partner that we help secure those listings. But yes, there are lots of new construction developments and Julie, this is also worth pointing out, the spec homes and whatnot do not make it into the MLS. You're not going to be able to get a list of specs. Now some of the larger builders will literally have a list of specs you can ask for, but don't be surprised if they're not being publicly marketed because a lot of the new build reps are going to want to have those as sort of in their back pocket. So if someone walks in, a buyer walks in and is desperate to want to close on something, the build rep will happen to have three or four homes that are just ready to go and they don't want to let the resell agents know about that because they need those in their back pocket to make a quick sale. So you're going to have to work the new construction of things. We see no reason why new construction won't be one of the biggest segments of residential real estate for at least the next 10 years. It's going to be extraordinary. Yeah. And you know, the new build reps generally are realtor friendly. Some of you still have stuck in your heads when the market was super overheated and some of those new build reps said, you know, no commission for you. We don't need to be dealing with realtors. Most of that has changed now. Maybe not a hundred percent, but it's probably 85, 90 percent. I can tell you, Tim, that KB Homes, Lennar, Toll Brothers, all of those guys do have spec homes, but you have to go meet with them, get on their mailing list, talk to them regularly, prospect them regularly and get into their center of influence. Go meet with them is the key thing. So what's the recurring theme with everything we tell you guys to do? Get off your butts, step away from your keyboards, one foot in front of the other, and go have conversations with real humans because in this marketplace, as strange as this is to say, you will have an unfair advantage because most everyone is believing they can just hide out behind their keyboard and buy leads. Point number eight. Point number eight, flippers. Sure, they might sell the home on their own, refer to the previous for sale by owner points, but flippers often will list with you so you can bring a buyer to them before they're actually finished with the flip. This helps them because they can flip more homes in less time, a bird in hand so to speak. Meanwhile, while you have it listed and they're finishing it, the house generates more and more buyer and seller business for you. It's a win -win for everyone. Okay, so we're going to drill down on this point really quick. This is probably one of the worst times ever to be a flipper, depending on when you bought the property. You're probably dealing with a whole bunch of pressures that are going to make your potential profit be eviscerated. So don't be surprised when you find some of these flippers that have purchased other houses that they planned on flipping that they would probably like to sell out of without having swung a hammer just because they need to get rid of it because they don't have the cash flow. A lot of these flippers were paying for the construction and even the purchase of these properties using hard money loans. Hard money loans now are well under the double digits from what I've understood. So yeah, flippers and all the fix and flip shows, I imagine those are going to be under a lot of constraint in the foreseeable future. That's definitely true. All right, point number nine, probate. We should talk about this more. Not many agents prospect probate leads because they don't understand it. Well, probate is simply the process of selling a home after someone passes away. The court appoints an executor of the estate who can sell the property. If keeping the home in the family is not an option and the executor or executors wish to cash it out, well, that's a listing and by the way, a very motivated listing. Sometimes they will reinvest the proceeds in real estate. Sometimes it's just the listing that you'll sell, but either way they need somebody caring and competent to get the job done and of course that listing is going to generate more business for you. Probate is great, frankly, if you're very analytical and you just want essentially business to business relationships because there's not, once you have the relationship with the attorney or attorneys, there's really not a heck of a lot of sales skills necessary because at that point you're just part of the attorney's process to get the property sold and this is something you're going to have to put a lot of effort into when you're establishing relationships and obviously then keeping the relationships, but we have had lots of coaching clients over the years that have done quite well for decades just off probate. Absolutely. And again, it's an example, just like builders are one relationship, multiple opportunities. You know what I'll do is if you remind me, I'll put in the link to our source for them to get probate leads into today's show notes. So if you can remind me of that, I'll put the link in the show description below and you guys can just click that link because there is a company we know that we'll provide you with all the leads for, you know, basically going and knowing who to call, what to call, the attorney's phone numbers, the properties, the whole nine yards, so you don't actually have to learn how to research it. You just make the phone call and use the scripts. Point number 10. Point number 10, your professional center of influence. When was the last time your favorite lender sent you leads? When was the last time you asked? Whom do they know who's getting pre -qualified right now to buy and has a home to sell as well? Stagers are also great to know because smart sellers call a stager first. So refer business to stagers and ask for leads in exchange. So your professional center of influence goes, I mentioned lenders and stagers. That's also your termite guy. It's your, you know, the person that sold you your cell phone, your professional center of influence. They might not be a past client for you, but you send them business typically all the time. They should be sending you business as well. The funny thing about lenders is I bet you 20 or 30 percent of all the people becoming real estate agents are former lenders. Are lenders. Yeah, for sure. Well, they were lenders that aren't lending because the lending industry is kind of, you know, plateaued. There is no more refinancing going on. Exactly. It's gone to nearly zero. And so you guys are all becoming real estate agents. Welcome. Point number 11. Yes, we are ex -lender friendly. All right. So investors, join your local investors club. You can find it at meetup .com or private Facebook investor groups in your town. You'll know who's looking for what property and which investors are likely to sell. This will also give you insider information about pocket listings, which you, which can benefit your buyers. We always use meetup .com as an example because you don't have to use Facebook, but really Facebook is essentially replace meetup .com as sources to find private groups. Focus on the ones, always we're going to say this, where you're going to be meeting people in person because a direct human face to face value to be like contact is always going to be more powerful than anything digital. You can send a text or message somebody on Facebook and completely forget about it in a minute. But if you have like a three or five or 10 minute conversation with somebody in person, that person's going to be bouncing around in your head for an attorney, right? So, well, again, I'm going to say it for the third time on today's show because it's really that important. You understand all of the stuff in real estate and in life works better when you work it. So that means you're going to have to learn how to actually have face to face real conversations with folks where you don't come off as a pushy salesperson, where you actually are saying things that are valued to them that results in you generating your real estate lead. That's the reason you joined premier coaching because that is where the unfair advantage will be. I know everybody wants to convince you that you can brand or buy or market or advertise your way to success, but you know what? Those in that space that are marginally honest will tell you that that's not true unless you're willing to wait forever, even then forever may never happen. So the reality of it is, is we focus always on proactive lead generation, which is enhanced by passive lead generation. But when you get good at the proactive lead generation, which is the, you know, essentially having direct conversations with people, you have probably will never be seduced into spending the money on the passive lead generation. If you're thinking, well, I can skip ever having to learn how to have direct conversations with people. I'm just going to buy my way, brand my way to success. You will go broke. So I mean, there you go. We need to patch that together. That's a whole bunch of B's branding, buying leads, buying broke, becoming broke. Instead of the seven P's, we'll have the seven B's. You and I can make some work on that. We'll work on that. Yeah. All right. So number 12, last but not least door knocking. And remember we did have an entire podcast series about this. This is not at the top of the list because it generally does take more contacts to take a listing, but it is still effective when you're consistent door knocking can help you become more comfortable speaking with people about real estate. And many times you will be at the right place at the right time. And indeed take a list from being there before you go door knocking, choose your neighborhood wisely. Does it turn over much? What's the average sale price what's currently active pending and recently sold what's being built around the corner from the neighborhood. Is there near new construction? Become the go to neighborhood specialist and use good scripts at the door. Like we teach you in premier coaching, start with your own neighborhood since you already know it well. You'll probably be most comfortable there and then you can expand from there. And again, refer to our recent podcast series about door knocking and for more help, be sure to ask your Harris certified coach, premier coaching members for additional support. It is a very hot topic right now. The main thing and listen to our three part show or maybe it was a four part show we recently did. Yeah. But the main thing with door knocking is that you have to go prepared. So for example, when you're door knocking the, and we give you tons of scripts and ideas for this, but the gist of it is, is you're letting them know about market activity. A new house that sold, a new listing that happened, something or something or several things. They don't have to, it doesn't have to be your listing or your broker's listing. You're just letting them know what's going on in the market. But you have to be prepared to have that person that's standing in front of you that you just knocked on their door tell you that they're thinking about selling their house. And you can say things like, for example, we're working with a lot of buyers in the area and if you, do you or anyone you know are thinking about buying or selling, I sure would appreciate the opportunity to help these folks out. Things like that, all of you can say, and you will be shocked how frequently that person that you're staying in front of, because you just knocked on their door, says, you know what, I'm not thinking about selling what my next door neighbor is, boom, you got a listing lead. Guys, that's how simple the business is. It's all about you doing the real work of real estate. If you're wondering why the current version of you is experiencing abundance, it's because six months ago you did the real work of real estate. Or, if the exact opposite is true, well, guess what, that's true as well. So please keep these things in mind, guys. We are telling you the fluff free, no BS way to succeed because of this market. How many of you are paying attention? Well, 15, 18, maybe 20 ,000 of you will download the show today. Another probably 17 or 20 ,000 will consume it on YouTube. How many of you actually are going to be doing the real work of real estate? Well, I know how many of you will be. It's the same percent that always will do the real work of real estate, which is only about 10 or 15 percent. But the rest of you, why would you not choose to follow the path that's been proven for decades to work for everyone? Why? Why would you do that? Why would you make your life so miserable? Here's another motivation, a motivational thought for you. Again, I know you can't project yourself easily into the future, well, just set yourself up for little awards, little surprises, little somethings to keep yourself motivated along the way. So if you make five contacts today, whatever your treasure map says, or ten contacts today, give yourself a little present or surprise for doing it. All kinds of little gamification of your own behavior until you get into the habit of actually having these, of doing the real work of real estate. It is about doing what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it at the highest level and being okay and understanding that just the emotional acceptance that if you want long term levels of ever increasing success, you have to do what you don't want to do when you don't want to do it at the highest level. And I realize some of you that's like fingernails on a chalkboard, but it's still the truth. It is still the truth. It is. You know, one of the best ways they can give themselves a little mini reward is when they're in premier coaching and they go to the daily live sessions with the coaches, one of the things that they do is share challenges and victories. So when you just had, maybe you just had a door knocking victory or maybe you just listed your first expired, it is actually very encouraging and motivational to go there and get that support from fellow agents who are going through the same thing from the coaches who say, keep up, right on, lather, rinse, repeat, go do it again. You can do it. Go you. Because we're not immune to the fact that a lot of these guys, when they're out there, they're building their skills. You can have days where you feel like it's really tough, like real estate, you know, I don't know if I can do this and then you have a victory and you go to those sessions and everybody says, you know what, I can't believe that I just had a similar victory. We can do this. And then you stop thinking that the market is so difficult and the changing markets kicking your butt. You're surrounded by like -minded people and by coaches who encourage your success and say, yeah, absolutely. You can have the best quarter ever. You just have to have the patience to understand that everything you want in life is going to require more effort and take a hell of a lot more time than you've been probably led to believe it would or hope that it would. And that's something, I mean, that is really, I wish I knew that when, uh, you know, you know, I got married 32 years ago and we started in business together like 30 years ago. I wish that I'd known that I would have been a lot more patient with things, frankly. Me too. But here's the thing, even though it will take longer than you want it to, it'll still take less time than if you don't take action. Yeah. You know, it's funny I said that, but at the same time you and I did sell over a hundred houses our first year. That's why you were laughing. I know. And between a hundred and 200 homes every year for almost 10 years. So I guess my lack of patience actually may have worked for us. It does. It still does this day. You know, it's funny you were talking about always keeping us in contract on rental properties. Well, we still are on those big projects. Yeah, I know. We do do that. Well, it's a habit though it is, but it's creating a false sense of, well, back then it was a real sense of scarcity, but it's creating a false sense of scarcity because you and I don't work really too well with the carrot. We work great with the stick, which is how most people are. They just don't realize it. Well, they don't want to admit it, but we work, you and I, we keep ourselves motivated by the fear of loss of what we already have.
Bankless
"austin" Discussed on Bankless
"Every L2 is highly centralized. Every roll up is highly centralized. The Solana ecosystem would love for this to be true. It is true. You can't run a permissionless layer two system. I'm categorizing this as one of the things that like Ethereum critics will say is true about Ethereum but will also not give credit for the fact that Ethereum has never failed to execute on this roadmap. These are two different things that you're talking about. And I get why you're trying to bring them together. But if we look at a world where ETH2 had actually done like L1 native roll ups, we wouldn't have a bunch of L2 tokens that have no economic value in existing. Right. That's not true either, bro. Sure you would. You would if you would definitely have the tokens but they had totally have economic value. Sequencer fees, man. Sequencer fees. Sequencer fees are paid in ETH, right? Two of the layer twos. You could have every L2 just have fractional transactions in Ethereum that would mean you wouldn't need all these different tokens every time you want to be on a different roll up or different network. You could just use ether everywhere. Wait, you only for optimism, polygon, arbitrum. Yeah. The only thing the only gas token that you need the layer two of is Starkware. And it's like the most Ethereum unaligned layer two of the ones I just I just mentioned. It's also the only one that allows you to run a permissionless node. But yes. Well, yeah, because they have the benefit of having to be they can get to create their own ecosystem from the ground up. All of the permissionless validation network participate like arbitrum just just induced and introduced permissionless validation this last Friday. And so yes, but they get their own problem still continue. So yes, it's the next thing on the road. They're going to do it, dude. Yes. But but you and Ryan are constantly being like, oh, man, like like Solana is so centralized, right? Like that was like a whole thing coming from a lot of the ETH brain community for a while. And it just didn't it felt very dishonest because. Yeah, I know. Right. Like it was this it was this transition from saying like Ethereum was depending on how you counted the first or second most decentralized network and the entire scaling roadmap collapsed that down into extreme centralization. And this is not to say that it will be that way forever. I actually do think that over time we are going to see L2 is decentralized. People are going to figure out a way to have permission. People are going to figure out how to have more than one single sequencer on a roll up or an L2 and then they're going to figure out how to have decentralized sequencers eventually. I just think we're several years away from that and we'll get there. Right. But there's this innate faith that you have. Yeah. Right. And that others have that. Ethereum is the only network that's going to figure it out. And I just don't see like I think if you look at the pace of new technology shipping on the Solana network and like where the network come in the in the three years that it's been live you'd say wow that's like an insanely high pace of innovation and change. This reminds me of how Ethereum relentlessly innovates on its core idea. And the point here is not to say like oh Ethereum is super centralized. It's that like what you have seen over your engagement with the network is that you have a faith that is going to figure it out. Right. And what I would say. Ethereum the benefit of the doubt and then we give Solana whatever is the anti benefit of that. Yeah yeah yeah exactly. Yeah. And but also because Ethereum has a track record and Solana is a newer network. And so if Solana still has to earn its stripes you know this is this is like what I've been calling the L1 hazing of the last bull market. Totally. It's like you're illegitimate until you make it through the next bear. I would say at this point Solana has been through at least as much hardship as Ethereum has. If Solana has certainly been through a lot of hardship and there are different hardships. They're very different. Like the Ethereum perspective would be like well Solana sold its soul to the devil with its with its cozying with SPF. Right. Ethereum's hardships were we almost ran out of money for two years straight.
Bankless
"austin" Discussed on Bankless
"Mantle formerly known as Bitdao is the first Dow led Web3 ecosystem, all built on top of Mantle's first core product, the Mantle network, a brand new high-performance Ethereum layer 2 built using the OP stack, but uses Eigen layers data availability solution instead of the expensive Ethereum layer 1. Not only does this reduce Mantle network's gas fees by 80%, but it also reduces gas fee volatility providing a more stable foundation for Mantle's applications. The Mantle treasury is one of the biggest Dow owned treasuries, which is seeding an ecosystem of projects from all around the Web3 space for Mantle. Mantle already has sub communities from around Web3 onboarded like game 7 for Web3 gaming and Bybit for TVL and liquidity and on-ramps. So if you want to build on the Mantle network, Mantle is offering a grants program that provides milestone based funding to promising projects that help expand, secure, and decentralize Mantle. If you want to get started working with the first Dow led layer 2 ecosystem, check out Mantle at mantle.xyz and follow them on Twitter at 0xMantle. Arbitrum is accelerating the Web3 landscape with a suite of secure Ethereum scaling solutions. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1 with flourishing DeFi and NFT ecosystems. Arbitrum Nova is quickly becoming a Web3 gaming hub and social dapps like Reddit are also calling Arbitrum home. And now Arbitrum Orbit allows you to use Arbitrum's secure scaling technology to build your own layer 3, giving you access to interoperable customizable permissions with dedicated throughput. Whether you are a developer, enterprise, or user, Arbitrum Orbit lets you take your project to new heights. All of these technologies leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM compatible. Faster transaction speeds and significantly lower gas fees. So visit arbitrum.io where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app with Arbitrum. Experience Web3 development the way it was always meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction free. So the Ethereum philosophy or just like approach stance towards MEV is eliminate it. Like do your best to suppress it. Do your best to democratize it. Obviously everyone knows it has realized that there actually is no eliminating MEV. You can only push it to a different place. But the place that we want to push it towards the philosophy of Ethereum is into Ether the most decentralized components of Ethereum. And so rather than letting one central party own the MEV stack, like capture MEV and own it themselves, and they are just the MEV service provider of Ethereum and their jump capital collecting all their MEV, no, you take it from the large players and democratize it by just putting it into Ether the asset. And the holders of Ether the asset, again, the most decentralized component of Ethereum are actually the thing, the people, the party of people that benefits from this. Does Solana have some sort of philosophy or strategy as to where it wants MEV to go or what is the end destination of Solana MEV? I think that's a slightly rosy interpretation of what happens on Ethereum. There are still like one of the core principles of blockchain is British self-interest economic forces drive good results for everyone. And so there's definitely still a lot of people on Ethereum that are doing MEV that is not sort of as a public good, but as a personal enrichment activity. This is like the long-term desire and with appropriate mechanism design, this is where it goes. Like we don't have MEV burn yet, but in the final conclusion, this is like what the Ethereum stance towards MEV is.
Bankless
"austin" Discussed on Bankless
"I think as we go into the future, no one can really say what's going to happen here. We all just need to figure out what are the best defense mechanisms to prevent the sort of bad scenarios from happening that we don't want to have happen. Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on the show, we've got some bonus content for you, Bankless Nation, an episode diving into the nature of soul, the asset, and the economics of Solana, the ecosystem. We haven't done too much Solana content on Bankless before. So little. In fact, I'd say that it's actually kind of a meme that Bankless just doesn't produce Solana content. We've had Anatoli and Raj on once to discuss the Solana phone. We had Anatoli himself exclusively on earlier this year post FTX collapse to give us the Solana story. And then I also went on the validated podcast, which shorthand is just the Solana podcast hosted by Austin Federer, the guest on this episode. So that's the entire spectrum of Solana content coming out of Bankless. But on this episode, we're having Austin Federer on to discuss the design philosophy that relates Solana the network to Sol the asset. And it's really Sol the asset that has been the thing that has hung up me and Ryan the most while trying to understand the Solana ecosystem. The investment thesis behind Sol has never really been salient to us. If you know the Bankless thesis, you know that we think that there are very strong technical bonds between the design architecture of a layer one and the nature of the native asset that it produces. And tinkering with the properties of one impacts the properties of the other. We think that a layer one that prioritizes decentralization and censorship resistance at the base layer produces downstream strong store value properties in its native asset where a high throughput layer one, for example, sacrifices the hardness of its money by compromising on its issuance schedule and the properties of censorship resistance. This has always been the Bankless thesis that has guided us in our investing and our content. It makes sense to us, so it's the frame of reference that guides our thinking across other areas. And it's how Bankless has gotten the brand of being an Ethereum podcast. Even though we're not, we're just a Bankless podcast. We've got our theses, it happens to line up with Ethereum, and therefore, for all intents and purposes, we're an Ethereum podcast. I see how people come to that conclusion. Sometimes, though, perhaps most of the time, the Solana community doesn't accept that, and Bankless is a subject of a lot of hate out of the Solana community. And it's also impossible to tell what signal and what is noise here. Crypto tribes, again, a crypto tribe. And the loud members of tribes often just drown out the quiet and contently satisfied parts of crypto. But nonetheless, Austin has always been a treat to converse with. If you haven't listened to my episode with him on his podcast, Validated, I highly recommend it. If there are any listeners out there who have been following my path through crypto ever since my POV crypto podcast days, my podcast before Bankless, these conversations with Austin feel a lot like my conversations with CK, my old Bitcoiner co-host, which is where a lot of early development of my thinking in crypto began, and like Bankless, were both me and my co-host learning and content producing in tandem, which is what I think that you will experience here with this episode with Austin about Solana and Sol, the asset. So without further ado, let's go ahead and get right into that conversation. But first, I want to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible, especially Kraken, our preferred exchange for 2023. Whether you're an ETH fan and you buy your ETH, you're a Solana fan and you buy your Solana or you're a Bitcoin fan and you just want to dollar cost average into Bitcoin, we can all meet in common ground, which can be the Kraken exchange. If you don't have an account with Kraken to dollar cost average into your favorite assets, perhaps consider clicking the link in the show notes to get started with one today. Kraken Pro has easily become the best crypto trading platform in the industry, the place I use to check the charts and the crypto prices, even when I'm not looking to place a trade. On Kraken Pro, you'll have access to advanced charting tools, real time market data and lightning fast trade execution all inside their spiffy new modular interface. Kraken's new customizable modular layout lets you tailor your trading experience to suit your needs. Pick and choose your favorite modules and place them anywhere you want in your screen. With Kraken Pro, you have that power. Whether you are a seasoned pro or just starting out, join thousands of traders who trust Kraken Pro for their crypto trading needs. Visit pro.kraken.com to get started today. Introducing Polygon 2.0, the value layer for the internet. For too long, the limitations of blockchains have held back app development and stifled user adoption. The internet allows anyone to create and exchange information. What's missing is a value layer that lets anyone exchange, store and program value. That's where Polygon 2.0 comes in. Polygon Labs has unveiled a series of innovations that will radically alter the Polygon ecosystem and Web3 as a whole. By leveraging groundbreaking ZK innovations such as Polygon ZK EVM, the next iteration of the best-in-class Plonky 2 proving system, and a first-of-its-kind ZK-powered interoperability layer, Polygon 2.0 will give users and devs unlimited scalability and unified liquidity. Right now, there is a Polygon improvement proposal regarding a potential ZK-powered upgrade of Polygon Proof-of-Stake. If approved, Polygon Proof-of-Stake would become a layer 2 ZK EVM validity. So make your voice heard on this proposal by joining the Polygon Discord today. You have a chance to help the Polygon community give the internet the value layer it deserves. Are you planning to launch a token? Is your token already live? And are you granting your employees and contractors vesting token awards? And are you trying to figure out how to take care of taxable events for your team? Toku makes implementing a global token incentive award simple. With Toku, you will get unmatched legal and tax support to grant and administer your global team's tokens. Toku will help you navigate across the lifecycle of your token from easy-to-use pre-launch token grant award templates to managing post-cliff taxable events with payroll. For legal, finance, and HR teams, it's a huge complex task to have to comply with labor laws, payroll and tax obligations, tax reporting, and crypto regulations in every country that you employ someone. It's difficult, time-consuming, manual, and costly, and it's drawing more attention from global regulators and governments. Toku makes it simple for leading companies in the space, Protocol Labs, Hedera, Gitcoin, and many more. So if you want some help navigating the complex world of token compliance, go to toku.com slash bankless, or click the link in the description below. Bankless Nation, I would love to introduce you to Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, host of The Validated Podcast, where Austin and I, not too long ago, went back and forth on some of the cultural and philosophical differences between the Solana and Ethereum projects. Today, on the show, I want to continue that conversation with a focus on the native assets behind these two ecosystems, ETH and SOL, with a specific focus on SOL, of course, because the rest of Bankless focuses plenty on ETH. Because the focus on SOL, I think, I would say is the biggest hang-up that both Ryan and I have about being able to integrate Solana, SOL, as an investment thesis. What actually is SOL? I don't actually know the answer to that question, so hopefully we can start to get around the help. Austin, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me on. This is going to be fun. Yeah, so, Austin, that was my preamble. And we did a show on The Validated Podcast, which, if any Bankless listeners out there is looking for the intersection of Solana and Bankless, that would be the show to listen to. And, Austin, I had a ton of fun in doing that, and I think we can just keep on going with that conversation, like I said, specifically with the focus on the native assets behind these ecosystems. I think there's a very deep integration between culture and asset in this space, and that's one of the cool things about programmable money, is you can program values into your assets. And I want to know, from your perspective, what is programmed into SOL, the asset? And sometimes I speak in these words, and I'm not sure everyone totally understands it, but I think you totally do. Are you ready to get into this conversation? Yeah, let's do it. I think one of the analogies that helps people sometimes is the architecture of a network is sort of thought of as a city zoning. That New York is very different than San Francisco for many reasons, but one of them is literally just what the zoning is of different parts of the city and what you're allowed to build there, and what the sort of innate characteristics that these rules and frameworks set up. That's a pretty good analogy for non-technical people for blockchain architecture, that the architecture Bitcoin is based on allows a very different set of things to be done on that network than what can be done on a network like Solana or Ethereum. Sure, sure. And any long-time Bankless listener will know that Ryan and I have developed models over time. And one of the big stories of Bankless, it runs in parallel with the story of Ether, because Ether in 2017 is not the Ether of today. It's had a story arc. We had to truly fight for the understanding of ETH as money, ETH as collateral, ETH as triple point asset, which now is ultrasound money. And this was a story arc that's developed. And would you say that the Sol token is going through a similar story arc? Because that's my frame of understanding for these things, and I'm wondering how to think about the story arc of Sol the asset. So I want to get into that. I think one of the things that's useful is just a quick overview of what Solana is trying to do from a network architecture perspective. So the thesis of Solana originally was basically block chain and NASDAQ speed, was the idea that you could build one global state machine that was going to be as fast as traditional financial markets. And it was a pretty narrow thesis in the beginning. There wasn't NFTs involved, there wasn't social tokens, there wasn't all this other world that we now consider the broader part of Web3. But that core thesis was that Ethereum was right about one very important thing. Everything is better in one global state. And when you start fracturing the state up into side chains and L2s and even the approach that NIR takes with sharding, you reduce the developer experience, you hurt the user experience, and that if you can keep things in one global state, that is better. Now there are downsides of keeping things in one global state. An Ethereum node is a very light operation. It's computationally very easy to run, it's bandwidth-wise very easy to run, because Ethereum only does about 20 things per second. And so that is a decision that's made to keep those requirements super light. Solana, the requirements are heavier. It takes about $3,000 of hardware to run a validator on Solana that will keep up to the tip of the chain. What that also lets you do, though, is things like keep one global state and have a steady state of 4,000 transactions per second. And so these are all just different architectural decisions about how to do things out into the future. I have a whole bunch we can talk about about how ETH is actually going to get much heavier and much more difficult to run, especially as we start talking about tracking L2s and rollups and getting a full state of Ethereum if now, as you've said yourself, if Ethereum is Optimism and Arbitron and Hermes and all of these other types of things, you suddenly need to run 6, 7, 8, 12 nodes to actually get a full snapshot of the state of Ethereum. But just to sort of start out, that's kind of the basic grounding principle of Solana is that keep the network as fast as possible, keep the cost of transactions as low as possible, and sort of the model that Ethereum has gone for of sort of artificial scarcity on the base layer and then offloading the scaling onto L2s and rollups and sort of things like that. The design decision on the Solana network is to flatten that into one stack. And this flattening goes even further, right? So on Ethereum, you have the EVM and you have Nakamoto consensus that run beneath it. Like if you look at the stack, there are two separate layers there. That is part of why if you run Geth locally, you max out at about 400 TPS. There's limitations there that are from a software architecture, not necessarily a network architecture perspective. Solana flattens that into one layer. So the VM and the consensus layer are basically all running in the same spot. One of the trade-offs of that is if you have a crash in the VM, you're going to actually have a crash in the consensus protocol. Whereas what you saw with Ethereum is when the VM crashed, for lack of a better term, earlier this year, twice, the network was actually able to continue. Now it couldn't reach consensus, they couldn't finalize transactions for an hour or so, but that was a totally different type of experience than what you had saw in Solana in 2021, where you'd have an outage where it wasn't a finality problem, it was a block production problem.
Awards Chatter
"austin" Discussed on Awards Chatter
"Their only child, Elvis and Bristol's only child Lisa Marie said, quote, if Austin butler doesn't win an Academy Award, I'm going to eat my foot close quote. The awards season journey that you have been on since can. And that will end on March 12th and I wonder how you would describe it to somebody who basically meaning 99.9999% of the world who's not experienced this. I mean, it's a pretty as somebody who observes it as a journalist each year. I have a little bit of an idea, but you can't know unless you're experiencing it. I imagine there are some pretty high highs. Very sadly, in the case of your film's journey, there was a very low low, just two days after a wonderful Golden Globes. What are you going to tell your kids one day about this awards season? I might need some more time to process this, you know, I might have a better answer in a couple months. It is so much more of a roller coaster than I could have ever imagined. Because it is incredibly, it's incredibly beautiful to get to experience people like all of you who've watched the film. This I can't tell you how much it moves me. Walking into this room and that reception that you all gave because I truly didn't know if anybody would like to film. And I. You know, you give everything to every role. But this one was particularly, I can't imagine ever feeling more pressure than I did for this one. So just the reception of all of you and of all of the fans that I met even in Budapest where I was filming dune. There's people all over the world that have been so generous with giving their love. And it means so much to me. And then getting recognition from peers and suddenly being around actors that have looked up to my entire life who are complimenting the work, it just means so much to me. So those are the things that I rest in. Because it is exhausting. I mean, I'm not going to lie to you. I've been talking about the same film for almost a year now. And most of the time you're answering the exact same questions every day. And you try to not answer them in the exact same way, even though it's the same question. And so there are those exhausting days, but ultimately I just, I try not to let the things in that aren't the joy for the most part.
Awards Chatter
"austin" Discussed on Awards Chatter
"Four, but that's just a little snippet. Thank you. Thank you to Steve for that. So I guess that just to connect the dots between your childhood around here and getting into acting. You've said that your parents divorced that 7 when you were 7. Yeah. Your mother briefly remarried. That meant that you had a stepbrother and how did that kind of lead to the beginning of all this for you? Well, so I had to step brother and his father was a hairdresser. And my step brother always, he always admired afros, but he wasn't gifted with one of those. So he asked his dad to give him a perm. And it turned out really strange and so he had this wild head of hair and he never looked quite right. I still remember him with those little perming things in his hair. And so he was at the Orange County fair and had just this really unique look. And got scouted by background talent agent. And so they said, you know, you should come up to LA and audition for this thing. And we didn't realize what being an extra was. We just thought, you know, you're going to be a star. You're going to be, you know, you're going to be a movie star. And so I just went along as there are other son, you know? And we got up to LA and it turned out to be this giant casting call. And then they said, you have another son. He should do it too. And so I went and I don't know what came over me that day because I was so shy. I would never talk to anybody that wasn't very close to me. I've said it before, but I would whisper to my mom, what I wanted to order at a restaurant, she would order for me. So the fact that now this is my job and I'm in front of a lot of people right now, this is not in my nature, you know? But she, yeah, she said, you want to do it Austin. I don't know what came over me, but I said, yeah, I'll do it. And so I had to read this audition for, I think it was a Welsh grape juice or something like that. And years later, I found out they didn't even have film in the camera. But my legs were shaking and I remember reading this audition and then they said, okay, we'll get them head shots. I'm gonna do this thing and so then we had to pay them money and they got us edge shots and different things. And that's how I got on my first set. And I believe started out fairly regularly doing background work on the Nickelodeon show Ned's classified school survival guide.
Scoops with Danny Mac
"austin" Discussed on Scoops with Danny Mac
"I was at the tv station. friday night. It was the return of the fox to prep zone. And we're gonna have high school football coverage from around town and the game of the night and everyone knew it going in was e saint louis in cbc. And i'm watching scores role in checking on things and i realized eight earl austin's at this game and it's the return of earl lost and the earl time updates. He started doing this a few years ago where he'd be at a game and he would be tweeting video out constantly. And it's almost like you were there and quality highlights to luther burden the third who is a superstar in that. I would see a little blurb that says you know the kickoff from luther burden oh wait a minute. The kids superstar wide receiver is kicking off. And then i saw something about him. Punting is this wait a minute. I gotta talk to earl. Because he was at the game and he's been doing this for a long time. I prep assignment in the saint louis area. It was like thirty six years ago. And i wanted his perspective. You know this kid burden compares to what other players in terms of electricity and superstar talent so earl loss. Junior is the guest on the kilcoyne conversation quite simply the guru of prep sports and i used to think. Think if you wanted to know who is the best seventh grader in the country at basketball dick tau with no the kid's name well earl is like that in beyond when it comes to area prep across the board. Not just football. Not just basketball. He'll tell you who's got that great cross country program or somebody's going to be really good this in tennis. He lives in breeze the sports scene the high school sports team. And he's just the nicest guy in the world he really is. I know by ramsey. His longtime radio part on silicon games has dubbed him. The awesome won or lost in junior but he could not be a more friendly personable guy and kudos to him for starting the earl. Tom update and i asked him about that. Because i was curious you know he is a he calls it. An old curmudgeon sportswriter. Except he's not a curmudgeon never to be confused but he started getting real involved in social media in my cousin. Cousin john Had a son played high school football. And on friday nights he would go to the games but if his if his son was playing he'd be like locked on the earldom updates and want to know what's going on around town. I mean this is become a thing and Earl gives us a little bit of a week one. Recap some of the top area performers of the top area teams talk a lot of prep sports on the kilcoyne conversation but earl austin junior his career in and of itself. I'm curious i didn't know how he got started doing. Billions radio alongside bomb. Ramp bob.
Rebecca Sounds Reveille
"austin" Discussed on Rebecca Sounds Reveille
"And that's what i say. Don't let people try and persuade you on. What do you do what you love to do. Now that i actually. I think that nakae has had one of the best slogans ever And that's just do it you know. Don't be afraid that step. i love it in fire. Your father love. What you're saying is right. You really have to do what you wanna do. Don't let people weigh you down. Stay focused go for it. You need to just do it because we only live once. So i wanna thank both of you so much for taking time to be with me today to be with the audience to share it absolutely. I saw just water trigger over here on. We actually do have a gofundme campaign. We're dealing to help yet. Race offensive finish the project with the all the post production there and you can go to austin fox fox two exits dot com and get all their information in this from really right behind the scenes photos and of the production. Is that death on there as well. Actually i'm really glad that you brought that up. Because i think it's important for the viewers to also get involved because they are now connecting with you and they're going to be able to move forward with a lot of the things that you've got going on and are often people are gonna be able to follow you for a long time because you are committed young man that is growing in this industry and with what you're doing right now there's an unlimited unlimited potential in entertainment and i can see that You you've got a long long will road on this in this industry so i am really excited to follow you. And i know corey You've got to be add ons and proud and with white. You're in a d something that we're gonna wanna follow for you as well so thank you both so much for being with me today. Every mass we most definitely. And i wanna thank all of you for watching and tuning in today. Please make sure to take a moment. Not only do one. But two things go to austin fox with two axes dot com and contribute to the go fund me page so that you can get involved with the post production process and you can get in the some Some extra behind the scene things. That maybe aren't out there. You can get in volved with that and then you can see what happens at after everything is all done and on screen really exciting and not only that we ask that you share the show with all your friends your family your loved ones and even the people that you don't know all over social media again go to austin fox dot com and we ask that you tune in again for the next episode next week..
Rebecca Sounds Reveille
"austin" Discussed on Rebecca Sounds Reveille
"Welcome to rebecca sounds reveille. I am absolutely as static. Because i have not one guest today but to that are going to be something so different ensue. Unique that they're going to share a lot about the things that they're doing in well the world of entertainment today with me. I have austin hawks who Oh gosh he's an actor and director for mom and eli. Three april's in march and with me also is cory fox and he's an actor producer. He's known for the adventures of rocky and bully goal. Yes and the majestic and amherst but there's so much more to these two you would never really move. Put it together unless you saw them together yourself and your the our father and son both in entertainment doing what they do. Best directing producing and being very involved in entertainment so with me and we know who is who. Yes austin and corey. So austin i'm gonna have you go first and let you introduce yourself to the rebecca sounds reva audience were yes and you said my austin. He's the koi guy. I am after and i am. I am the director and producer writer. On mom i must have been another addicts as he says searchers. He lied those in march and he does zang's in arm tear ham high corey fox. Yes you can tell. I'm his older brother. Sorry mistaken me as its father. I go with over breath now. I this father messing with eighty. That's pretty good. Because i thought i was wrong and i thought i knew you guys pretty well. I'm thinking oh my goodness how did i miss this. Because i thought i really need is okay there. We go no. No i other. I'll be fifty this year so On the young side But yeah again. I'm an actor and producer. I actually got started this back in nineteen ninety eight nine thousand nine hundred nine accent To california moved out there. Because i wanted to be an actor about a little bit better behind the camera than in front of the camera so i started producing. We started a film. Production company called lifeline. Retainment out there and How we made by feature films a couple of horror films some dramas a really cool documentary called almost beautiful. We build around on the golf rock band or not. Six months went out the puerto rico with them and that was all fun to put together spending when they flew back in a hurricane yet will and then see. I had kids at four. Three boyd's tyler. Austin and i have a daughter named shelby which she's grown up and married and out of my hair thank you. I mean it's august true. This is so beautiful. You guys make such a good team with what you have going on and let me ask you austin. How did you kind of find your niche ear in mind that this is what you were wanting to do. Well when i was little. I did live. Oh model thing. Now's disown little bitty baby then. When i was about ten. I hadn't been interest in tv. So i asked my dad and you use a direct in california and asked him. I wanna be enacted. Daddy said you have to classes at the learns apps take classes a and yet for acting school called. Barbara's on and i studied therefore vow hack year invested to have competition. I just taking place in my division. And i call backs from about thirty eight Thirty to allah's law. And i asked her are going after reviewing talking to sound empty. Signed like her agent. Don in georgia andhra remedy. Then he gets a big part in a big movie. Are you allowed to elaborate a little bit more on. yes yes. 'cause i mean i know that there's parameters on this but if you could talk about your big part i wanna hear it. Well i think to rush saying what i care much about with necessary experience Go with it right. So miss out this boy who has an autoimmune disorder and after going into a house to days some treatment by dab that the house isn't really what seems drive and say it.
NASCAR America
"austin" Discussed on NASCAR America
"Me to listen to with what we want you to hear us wherever you get your pockets coming to the end of stage to at the race at michigan this accident involving austin and brad kazlauskiene austin dillon's belts say it. I mean i'll admit. What did i. I got on a private talkback and i ask. Jeff jeff what exactly that. Just see right. It was shocking. Probably the best moment though is when we saw austin dillon. Climb out of that car. It really took my breath away joining us to discuss this and a lot more of the race yesterday. Pizza sony from the morning drive on sirius. Xm radio so pete first of all thanks for joining us. Let's touch base on that rack. That had to be a big topic. Good discussion with the fans today. Because i'm not really sure what i thought the window really was and you know i've seen myself. Obviously it's on happened alive yesterday. When i was watching it on nbc. And you know. I heard the jar brad. In i'll dean was purposeful by any means and some listeners. May be kind of felt that way. I don't think so. I heard the audio from austin apologizing. I know people to like this like the point. The finger because controversy is what people like in sports. I just use kind of one of those racing deals. I don't really see any fault on either side but also can't tell you that i'm not continue to scratch my head. Was they were so far past. Start finish line. That's what really struck me. There as you said carbon was. Okay do today. What i did yesterday. Which is gonna lick to my left at two drivers your tell me what happened because i couldn't figure it out yesterday. Know watching it yesterday. I said the only thing that i thought that austin really had a major beef about is why is brackets lousy. Still in my panel. This far down the straightaway. I had a conversation with brad little bit ago. And it all got a lot more clear to me. He thought because the information coming to him because the sem day that he says was a lap behind he thought he was coming to the one to go at the end of the state so he thought they had left to go so he was trying to hang on the right rear quarter panel pulling back to try to passing back in turn one so that all makes perfect sense because he was my world. Why are you so close. And then it's rough when you go below that white line. Those big bumps also car came up a little bit. I think you hit those bumps. it came up trying to sidra him to get back to and get into turn want to try to get back by and he thought they were coming to one to go into sage and after he told me that. I'm like oh well that clears it up now. Understand that makes way more sense understanding that information. Well it makes more sense. It's still is not good for also now veasley in that situation. Whatever may have happened pete. How about this aside from that. What were the fans talking about. As far as the racing this there was a big change to put this package together to make the racing more competitive only type tracks. Are they liking what they're seeing. It's interesting dj. Because i don't have the official tally but it really felt like with bagman either smarty. The majority of the listeners really like the racing mentally. It's different to your point. We know it's a different package. We know the horse our is is lower. We know that drafting become such a big part of this. You know we heard some of the drivers. Saying i mean the where the race ryan blaney saying. I really don't like the rates this way. But this is how you have the race but the end of that race. The last ten laps more just really really in my opinion a lot. Recently you guys have over. The years at michigan international speedway it was there was going from start to finish their yesterday where i personally thought it was a really good race so i think the fans again. A lot of them are split. I think social media kinda here. One thing. But i can tell us on sirius nascar radio. A lot of folks really liked that race and they were surprised. Rhyme lady was in position to win the race at the end on. The a lot of people had lady as their winter that race. But you know what he did everything he had to do to to victory lane and turned out that way for him yesterday afternoon. There and the irish shells i will say that What i liked about a dj was that it still took good cars. What i mean by that is sometimes you go to talladega. And i don't want to call it completely up in the air because that's unfair to the talent of the drivers who are out there doing job but immediately i think the equipment is more equal there than any other race track and michigan. It wasn't equal. There was still fast cars and slow cars. I think that helped me enjoy the race because not anyone could lead. You still have to fight your way to the front. Can i say this about what drivers say about the raising. And i appreciate you saying that. This is what we have to work with jeopardy. You'll remember back many years ago but as we were transitioning from by slot cars to radio tires. Did any of us like what a radio tire felt like. We had to work with me and ain't so we went job the best that we could. Well that's how i look at it. I mean they make the rules. Nascar does right. The drivers have to work with those rules are gonna drive over. They have to drive hoochies at the set. The cars.
Ask Women Podcast: What Women Want
"austin" Discussed on Ask Women Podcast: What Women Want
"The hot models. Go like a man with hair on his chest but not on his back. I like a man with those commercials. Oh, I don't know, but they're bad commercials. We can do so much better for those to let people off. Honestly, we can tell these men want to do with her with her hair. If you rock the bush that Burt Reynolds Rock the bush for a long time. He got a lot of chicks. Okay. So if that was the eighties that was let's just consider Tera Bap. Yes, but also the thing is, if you are dark-skinned, I won't drag this out too long. But if you do have darker skin, it doesn't work as well. Because you need to have contrast for the from the hair to the skin so that the laser can recognize it. So if you are going to do a laser don't go in the sun, don't get a tan. Don't eat carrots. I know, I was like, oh, thank you. Probably obviously, try to keep your skin as light as you possibly can be. Really your bush, laser know, but I'm thinking about it. I've Got a Feeling armpits, my any line, everything. I love it. Wow. Lasers amazing. It's it doesn't hurt. There's a whole bunch of different kinds of lasers. You can get too, but laser has been my savior. I told you about my father that passes on. So I had to remove all of that and that's all the the questions that I have a job. I thought we were going to talk a lot longer. But thank you for asking these questions and hopefully we gave you really good answers to her with. I think we did a great job and Steve did a phenomenal job. Oh by the way, bro. Seriously, you should come back more often on. This is this come back more often, especially ammos going to get his Bush slash Journey SE lasers. His books home and me die on the ten-year Journey. Hm. The guys if you want to write in to have us analyze your situation right into a scat ask when women podcast,, we get a lot of emails. I'm so sorry. If we didn't get to yours this week. Hopefully, we will get to them this year. We have like hundreds of emails in our mailbox right now. But again, ask it, ask women, podcast.,, see, where. Can I find U? Now provide me at Twitter. Steve Austin vs are in and check out the Steve Austin show on podcastone.com and iTunes. Yeah. Listen to Steve show. You're an amazing interviewer. Yeah. Yep. That's all the talking about this morning. She said she knows there's problems. We love that man. Mobile set it up. Have you all on the show would love to and I enjoyed my time here. Thank y'all for how long we've been talking about it. Since we met, we did it. We did wonderful. Thanks again for being on the show. So guys, follow us on Twitter at twitter.com, ask women. I can, I ask him and podcasts. I cannot say ask woman later. I realize we will see you next week. Download all new episodes every Thursday, right? Every Thursday by choice..
Out of Bounds Podcast
"austin" Discussed on Out of Bounds Podcast
"Load up our bikes with sixty pounds of gear and we there's it's the greatest bike trail I've ever been at my entire life as far as like every ten miles, there's an iodine treated well, so you get water, the whole way, there's primitive campsites. It's along the Potomac, the entire way. So, every night you swim so you get like, a fresh reset, get all salt, it's It's like intro to bikepacking and it's it couldn't be easier and more fun and beautiful and there's we did it during covid-19 years so we were fully self-contained like oh nice cuz we felt back on doing it in general with that guilt. But it was also like we brought all our own food. We didn't shop, we didn't stop. We did one. Restock at REI, we had everything delivered to our faith in D C. Like Drop shipped, we picked it up and then we kept going. So we had like that was our miniex but other than that like fully off, cuz when in our lives are we going to have? 8 days that six friends can just go on a bike trip, like doesn't happen anymore, so that Trail's fun, but it's so easy. It's such a gift. It's like a, it's an old railroad. So it's just smooth and flat and some saved. It's amazing. But Austin, anything else you want to talk about your private on Instagram? I don't want people to follow you. There, everyone look up, Austin horse, cuz he's he doesn't like to pretend, like, he's this big Guru, but he's literally the king of fixed gear. I'm sure there's greater Heroes out there, I'm sorry, but you were my inspiration forever wanting to ride, a fixed gear. You put it on the map. You made people realize that like this could be a career or you can make money and you could do really read things and travel the world by writing a fixed gear bicycle. So thank you so much, anywhere people can follow you. Look at what you do or they can just listen to them. And that's all they get. Well, I guess my Twitter is not private so I'm Austin. Horace on like all my things and I guess the Twitter is the only one that is a good one to follow that. I'm active on home, mostly, I'm just sort of like shouting into an echo chamber of people who followed me ten years ago on Twitter and then stopped using it. It seems like. So Twitter's back Twitter is back and popular again. So everyone everyone go. Follow Austin on Twitter, he's a super activist. Although he's saying he's not anymore donate to any campaigns. He's doing which dead-ends like he's not doing anymore, but he's out there and thank you so much for taking the time to have a conversation. What I mean about the activism just is that you know, it was something that really did Define me in a community in a lot of ways and From like two thousand to like the Iraq War onwards. And last year, it was just so phenomenal to see the outpouring of people into the streets and, and the way that it became this thing that was that I could no longer even really consider as an identity, because it was just, like, normal of a sudden. It's just like, oh, yeah,.
Out of Bounds Podcast
"austin" Discussed on Out of Bounds Podcast
"What's up, everybody? This is mr. Automax. You're listening to the pursuit on the out-of-bounds network, so I geeked out over my guest. This week, his name is Austin horse, if you don't know who he is dead. Look him up on Google, Austin horse and listen to this episode cuz you can learn so much about this, dude. He is the reason I ever bought a fixed gear. The reason everyone loves to ride a fixed gear. He was sponsored by Redbull, Oakley All City, he basically turned currying into a career with sponsors by riding a bike off. He Everest he ever stood the Williamsburg Bridge which if you don't know what that is, you just do the vertical gain of Everest and you did it on a bike rack Williamsburg Bridge. We talked about that, the guy he's just insane but really he's the I reached out, I geeked out, I praise him a bunch because he's in a game. Using athlete. Who doesn't give himself enough credit, he still ride his bike, all the time, he cares about our environment, we talked about all that about how. I mean it's just an amazing episode Austin's, amazing dude. I'm geeking out cuz I never thought I'd get to have a one-on-one conversation with this dude. So here it is episode 21 with Austin horse Okay. Austin one of my cycling Heroes, tell everyone who you are, what you do. Wow. All right, well thank you very much for that. My name is Austin horse since 2005. I've been in New York City as a bike messenger. And I've really seen a lot of the the way that things have changed over those years. It's it's pretty remarkable to have been there at that moment and to be where I am at. You know, the moment that I am now off, the bike world has changed a lot. I actually started, I guess I guess I became really involved and enamored with bikes as a teenager. It was my first job as soon as I could legally be employed was at a bike shop and it's just been It's been hard to leave bikes ever since. Where, where are you from? Originally grew up in Houston. Okay, and what brought you to New York City? My grandparents are, from my, my fax from New York. My grandparents were in Upstate New York and I moved, I moved in with them in 2004 to take care of them. Okay. Go ahead and they were doing good. So I came to the same thing. That's amazing. I mean, that's best case, then all angles. So 2005 you moved here. Were you were you a fixie guy? Cuz you're like the fix, he guy for people who don't know, and maybe you don't think of it that way. But like, if I do well thank, you know, I I remember, I.
AP News
"austin" Discussed on AP News
"Austin. And left Texas. Because we want to. Breaks our heart that we have to do it. He talked to W. J L A. T V. The wildfires that have forced thousands of people to evacuate, are now burning across 10 states in the west from Wyoming to Alaska. In Northern California, where they've been battling the big Beckworth fire for days. Fire spokesman Jake Kagel says the backward complex is currently 91,200 acres with 26% containment. This is a P news. Google has been hit with a heavy fine in France. Here's our Charles de la Decima, France's competition regulator whose find Google $592 million over a dispute with French publishers, who want the company to pay for the use of their news. The regulator has also threatened finds of another $1 million per day. If Google doesn't produce proposals within two months on how it will compensate news producers, Google says it's disappointed and on the verge of reaching an agreement with the publishers. The dispute with French publishers is part of a larger effort by the EU to force Google and other tech companies to compensate publishes for content. I'm Charles delayed asthma, an 18 year old in Connecticut's been charged with computer crimes. After police say he hacked into a database and put a quote from a Hitler into a high school year book. He was a student at the high school. I'm Rita Foley. AP NEWS This.
The Ham Radio Show
"austin" Discussed on The Ham Radio Show
"It's the ham your show. Bill you were just saying what. I wanna make sure your magazine under seven one. Eight five seven seven. Thirteen eighty nine day still active. But we'll get ready for ray austin q. Day what do you do when you have no toilet paper in your bathroom any handle this situation. I need to know sound like a song. The might not be a bad song. Taken in new york who it is a hammer they show like. I say winning on the x division champion of the world the overweight title that will be defended this sunday. Rebellion twenty twenty. One live on pay per view the one and only the inevitable. Ace austin movie calling into the show. He's in a three way match. Ace austin hangs on Josh alexander and tjp for more information go to impact wrestling dot com. That's impact wrestling. You got to move. The phone rang and then disappeared back. 'cause you missed it i miss. It just popped up on screen thinking. It's the ham radio show. Who's on the phone. I think this is hung up now. They're they're dunkel. Leading is ross. Cross the l- man in charge of impact wrestling. He's a doctor. He plays one on television as well. The one and only ross to you have the x division champion of the world. Ace austin during defending champion widows. Oh i would like to speak to mr austin please here i feel like it's like roskin handle this on a team. Like he's he's the right once the entry interview. If you want ruskin jump in at any time if you wish russ has done during interviews. He yells at us all the time. Well he does is the watcher potty mouth that's number one reason we have to watch are potty mouths and if you remember when eddie edwards sure actually then impact wrestling world heavyweight champion. He would jump. And that's good idea ready and then write it down and then they take my ideas and then they make millions of dollars it. The curse of being a genius occurs speaking of genius. Bring genius ace austin on the phone as how are you sir fantastic. Who has a vision. Champion yeah i know. This bell doesn't hold up. His pants either has been known to drop his pants for many things and impact wrestling for more information by the way on a sodas and going to impact wrestling dot com by the way ace's nickname Inevitable which is a nod comic book. Now i know you're a big fan but so is it because thanos. Why did you go that route with the inevitable. I mean it wasn't directly because of fan but everything. I mean like my my entire character Since the beginning has kind of been in accidental parallel with superheroes. I mean i. I draw inspiration from suez because i've always always always loved bears and wrestling. Those are my two favorite things so There's always been a lot of parallels between my and superhero Ideas so so. Yeah yeah absolutely. Inevitable thing is born out of necessity and The bonus well it is. I mean look it is fitting. You are the number one contender to the impact wrestling world heavyweight championship which is now held by rich swann. Which will be defended against kenny omega at rebellion and one of the biggest matches ever to hit pro wrestling and how long billy was talking about back in the days with the territories was the last time we ever had so much hype over a main event match of this magnitude so like it's going to be crazy really insane really like i didn't even i don't think people really Understand the kind of change that this is going to bring about like this is really huge. There's never happened nick. Somebody from one company either way. Either kenny omega or rich one. Both for w which is on the big screen right. Now we have w armor or impact wrestling's. Yeah world heavyweight champion rich swann. Somebody's walking out with two belts so somebody's walking with another companies world heavyweight title that they're going to have to defend on access tv with on impact wrestling were on w. television on tnt. It is a crazy thought. And then at the end of the day the inevitable one who were on the phone with ace austin he gets the winner he gets to pick the bones and be that vulture and go after whoever's left standing because you're the number one contender to the world heavyweight title insanity right there yeah you damn right and the that that kind of schedule that kind of schedule you're talking about you know defending in the main event on impact wrestling and defending and main event. Not every week. That's the kind of scheduled at ace austin was made for but after amy might fair thing about it. Two guys used the best out machine. Kenny omega rich swann. One of the most amazing high fliers your take on that person. I don't know when that match is going to be set up. But you are the number one contender so at any time. You're going to take on that so you're going to live up to your name. I think it is inevitable. You're going to be the world heavyweight champion. I'm calling it now. i'm. I'm sure that roses writing going. Yeah he should be a world. Champion is going. Gonna teach eddie said. So that's what it should be where we're at and think about it. You get the guam off of probably. Haven't i of one of the best matches. That's gonna be a rebellion because when you take on josh alexander and tjp you're gonna have one hell tonight any way to me i to me that x division title especially with you and everything that you do is going to be. It's going to be insane. You you mean you. Have you have the filipino fighting phenom. Tjp you got frigging the walking weapon. Josh alexander joe. Joe's asking about the weight limit of this belt. There is no weight limit. That's the best part of the jazz. That's a big monster of a man. And i know that you have the big. Ms men then folded in your corner. You have the data that walking talking horror movie. That is in fulton in your corner. So i mean like you have it. Set up to be one of the best things pound for pound to watch and the baby view at the end of the day wing losers rule. Would you probably gonna win. But when loser draw at the end of the day the x division champion gets to take on whoever the hell is left. Standing in one of the biggest matches on pay per view and glommed. Spotlight as dawson needs more spotlight. But you know it's gonna happen. Twenty wear sunglasses indoors..
Todd Durkin IMPACT Show
"austin" Discussed on Todd Durkin IMPACT Show
"You're part of an organization that is trying to strive to have a culture man. These guys are going to share some nuggets today. So without further. Ado austin joe. Welcome to the impact jealous. Thanks man this. It's great to have you guys..
600 WREC
"austin" Discussed on 600 WREC
"Goolsbee professor Chicago Booth School economics, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for the Obama administration. Listen, the economy was humming along. We can do but I want to go back to this initial question. Do I need de programming? Do you think I need to go? Do I need to go toe Austin. Austin Goolsbee Reeducation camp. I was just trying to think. What would our curriculum be? Where would we even begin? Way we could start with football. I mean, are doing what you are You a jets fan and giant so delighted. Don't even listen to him. But why you humiliating me? Go ahead. I know the bear. They're in trouble to do you want to live in an America where we silence opposition voices? Because I don't You know if you read any social media And you read about Sean Hannity, your friend I've been you know, when I want to punish myself and just, you know, feel bad about myself. I could go on there and read all the crap all day. Um, but but I don't. I don't waste my time. But the point is, I'm not one time Austin in my life, what I ever want to silence anybody from ripping me to shreds. I don't care at that. We live in America. That's the way it should be. And you be open. Look, I do think what? How we balance the line. There's there's always a balance. If the president the United States is gonna literally get up and say flatly contradicted non facts. Engine people up. What do we do about excuse? All right, let me go back to that day because you're talking about January, 6th, the president said. Now many of you will peacefully and patriotic Lee march to the capital to let your voices be heard. Can you cite me anything in the president's speech that called for an insurrection? I don't think so. I wasn't paying close attention to his speech in the run up to that. Hey. The president said a lot of very inflammatory thing. I didn't ask you slow down. Slow down. No, no words matter here because I could play you Maxie Waters. Joe Biden does matter found going to play them for you. And Kamila Harris. And then you tell me if they're inciting any kind of cold insurrection will hold Austin Goolsbee through the break. 809 for one, Sean our number We'll get back to Austin on the other side and more. Your call straight ahead..
Cineflek
"austin" Discussed on Cineflek
"When he started seeing. What are you doing she said. I it's mike's part and you don't do that like i. Just don't do that like that. Just hurt really bad to watch like i. I've i tear up multiple occasions in this in this movie. I don't know like a lot of other people do. But that's one of the moments is Oscar isaac just like a very good actor. He conveys the emotion of hurt an emptiness so well not seen. I think that's the scene where i really i mean i. I hate him. The most in that scene. I think just because like after like the gore friends have done so much for him and he's crashed a dinner party with some with some friends of theirs and and then after that he makes her cry and storms out and then tries to stay with them a week later. Like it's it's clue that he's he's in a dark place. But i i really hate him in that part of the movie. That's that's the part that i find him. The most sympathetic funniest thing is we have completely different opinions on that dot for. Yeah no i. I think the the fact that the dude committed suicide. I think that does imply that there were some hard times before it wasn't like things. Were easy but it seems like it seemed like at least there was some optimism whereas now there's there's not the hope of a brighter future that he has I have my next note just really great moment in the movie was when when lewin goes to al cody's and then he has like all of his albums in the box and then he tries to with them under the table and he sees the alcove has the exact same thing right rare. It was like a pretty cool moment. It's like oh maybe cody has a similar story. I think the implication there is just like literally like so many people that are trying to make it in the city in the folk scene. It's so so so competitive Like to me that. Like i just get more hopeless when you just see how. Many dreams get crushed. I read recently that like that. Like the less than one percent of people in the screen actors. Guild can actually a living off of acting which just goes to show you. I mean like ninety nine percent of people that are on the screen actors guild. That just pop up here and there like they have to make a living doing something else and then performing here and there on the side. Like i mean i mean. The same is is true here where i mean it. Doesn't it doesn't seem like any of these guys are really making a living off of their dreams. Seems like they're just struggling to get by and it's sad to think that there's like so many people with with some talent out there that just can't quite catch a break. This this movie is just. It just feels really personal. The may just because of the circumstances. I was in when i saw this movie. Just seen it so many times read into it so much like i wrote two thousand words on it so you have for short list just has like a very special place in my heart. Do you have a quote. You want to wrap up the podcast with austin i i can. I can do the. Scooby doo lafferty pretty well. I was not expected that okay over here. Oh that's actually pretty good. I'm impressed well. It's been really fun chatting with you..