Weekly Roundup 09/18/26 (Clarity fails to advance, Caroline Ellison's new job, AI leaking MNPI, Poland's oil snafu)

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Matt Walsh and Nic Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and hosts may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

SPEAKER_2 (0:22)

Brought down by Bad Mortgage Investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated.

SPEAKER_3 (0:28)

Federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market and the Fed is asleep.

SPEAKER_4 (0:35)

The federal government is stepping in to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis.

SPEAKER_5 (0:42)

The Bank of England has pumped $75 billion more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

SPEAKER_1 (0:47)

You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin.

Matt Walsh (0:53)

Welcome to On The Brink, I'm Matt Walsh.

Nic Carter (0:56)

And I'm Nic Carter.

Matt Walsh (0:58)

Is it all clarity or are we going to talk about pacing the frontier today?

Nic Carter (1:01)

Well, last week was pacing the frontier.

Matt Walsh (1:03)

Yeah, but then Dario had a, was it Saturday morning pacing the frontier post?

Nic Carter (1:08)

Was that, we didn't talk about that last week?

Matt Walsh (1:11)

No, we talked about the coxswain thing last week, the whistleblower.

Nic Carter (1:15)

Someone tweeted that this is the least crazy AI discourses ever going to be.

And I agree. Like it's only going to get crazier.

Matt Walsh (1:23)

Yeah, it's crazier because it's crazy because of the people involved. Some of the people are just actual crazy people.

Nic Carter (1:29)

I mean, if only we had had some warning that EAs are megalomaniacs, you know, that will commit crimes in order to advance their lofty goals. Like if only there had been some great example of this.

Matt Walsh (1:43)

I think the FTX thing, just people attributed that to just crypto scammers. And there wasn't enough introspection about the fact that, no, this guy was part of a cult.

Nic Carter (1:52)

Yeah, I saw a lot of people saying on Twitter like, oh, well, you guys just found out what EAs are yesterday, and now you've got all these opinions about them. It's like, well, hang on, we in the crypto industry, we've known what EAs are. We've known this. Yeah, we had a dose of this. Half a decade.

Matt Walsh (2:06)

Starting in 2020, probably.

Nic Carter (2:08)

And it was so uncannily similar to what's happening now.

Matt Walsh (2:12)

It really was.

Nic Carter (2:14)

I mean, even the way Sam went about trying to pass regulation in DC, is reminiscent of what Dario is doing now.

Matt Walsh (2:22)

I was trying to think about that actually earlier today. What was that bill? It was the Bozeman-Stabenow bill or something? He really tried to ram market structure through that would have just killed DeFi.

Nic Carter (2:33)

Yeah, it was clarity before clarity and it was really noxious. And I feel like he didn't get that far with it, but he definitely tried.

Matt Walsh (2:42)

He tried really hard. And I think if he was in a more powerful position operating in the US, he might have actually gotten that through.

Nic Carter (2:50)

Yeah. I mean, he might have been a bit naive about how Washington works and things like that.

And I don't think he was actually going to get it through, but give him another three or five years or something and he might have. And yeah, I think it was going to kill DeFi.

Matt Walsh (3:03)

It's very similar.

Nic Carter (3:06)

So compare it to a large closed-source frontier lab, effectively arguing that open-weight AI shouldn't exist, and that the government should be involved in regulating a handful of large labs to the exclusion of the smaller ones. I mean, it's a very similar concept.

Matt Walsh (3:26)

It's just a peculiar world to live in that Mark Zuckerberg is the voice of reason here and he's saying, hey, you operate a company, you have responsibilities. We've gone a little bit slower because we're actually taking compliance into effect that he's the guy that's actually making the most sense.

Nic Carter (3:40)

I think our current framework works fine for what Dario is saying, frankly. You know, product liability is a thing. If your model goes haywire and starts committing crimes like OpenAI's did, that's already illegal. We don't need to invent new laws.