One of the more surreal articles I read in the last decade explained how some nations would move toward negative interest rates for personal bank accounts. Meaning the money you have in checking and savings, you could lose an ever increasing % of it annually for not spending or investing it, according to the whims of the ruling class. And if you did invest it, you would be taxed on its unrealized capital gains.
It sounded absurd, but if you want to see the truly unimaginable enacted into law, you usually have to look no further than the European Union.
This isn’t a new idea either. The European Central Bank, the institution that sets monetary policy for the eurozone, ran a negative deposit rate from June 2014 until the middle of 2022. The banks passed the bill down. By July 2021, 372 German banks were charging negative interest, and what started as a fee on large corporate balances had spread to private accounts of any size. Denmark’s Jyske Bank did it to its retail customers too. Europeans have already had money pulled out of their accounts for the crime of leaving it there.
Fresh off its grotesque new rollout, the “Migration Pact“, which forces quotas of foreigners into European nations, or charges €20,000 per migrant for turning them down, the protectors of liberal democracy continue to spread peace and prosperity with an iron fist:
As the EU is now interested in personal savings accounts, no doubt dismayed by the fact that the individual wealth of their nations is seeking to extricate their capital to places that are less ideologically punitive in their approach to personal finances.
JUST IN – EU President Ursula von der Leyen says that people's savings accounts are a problem
and that she must put this money "to the service of European companies"
says her plan to "securitize them" and "supervise them"
Notice what the solution never is. It’s never lower taxes, fewer regulations, or an economy someone would actually want to park capital in. The money isn’t leaving because Europeans are financially illiterate. It’s leaving because they can do math. So rather than create nourishing conditions, they’d rather cage it in.
Something that will be possible when the EU moves to a Central Bank Digital Currency is baking into the currency negative interest rates, and even expiration dates on the funds, forcing people to spend their money before it becomes irredeemable. Using it to force stimulus and investment, and increasing their ever tightening control over the native populations they continue to subjugate.
My view on Cryptocurrency, Blockchain Technology, and Decentralized Finance, is that it has both the power to financially liberate, or ensnare a people, depending on who is, and how it is, finally implemented.
It’s critical when the transition takes hold that competition, individual rights, personal choice and national sovereignty are the driving forces behind it, not technocratic enslavement.
You’re spending your most important resource right now and you may not even realize it. Your attention. And I thank you kindly for spending a little of it here.
Attention is the last commodity. It’s what is truly being struggled over in the streaming wars, sports, gaming industry, and both directly and peripherally, the AI boom.
Streaming was supposed to streamline, no pun intended, where your attention was going. Pay the fee, skip the ads. That lasted about a decade. Netflix, Prime, Peacock, Disney, Paramount — all of them run ads now. More than 60% of new Netflix signups take the ad tier. Streamers often lose money on their ad-free tiers versus what they would be paid to take less money and show their subscribers ads. When people began to cut the cable cord, corporations were desperate to get their brands and products in front of the eyes of consumers, wherever they so happen to be.
With YouTube Premium I skip the ads that play through Google AdSense at the beginning of the videos, but I have to manually fast-forward to avoid the product placement and paid sponsorships. Then there’s promo codes. Affiliate links. The ad used to interrupt the content. Now the ad is the content and you often can’t find the seam.
And we’re still just talking about advertising. That’s just one small aspect of this, the larger picture is simply, what gets our attention. And that applies to everything.
Underneath it all sits the algorithm, which isn’t trying to show you what’s good. It’s trying to keep you there. Short-form video is the purest version — an infinite column of stimulus tuned by a machine that knows your weak spots better than you even do.
SVA is Short Video Addiction. Executive control is the part of you that decides. That’s what’s eroding, and it’s already reached a dangerous point.
YouTube has recently changed their creator pay-out system, and it’s rewarding long form again after the short form gold rush. The thresholds went up on both sides, but long-form still takes the bigger cut of the split. The goal is simple. Keep people on the platform longer, and have more content people are willing to sit through ads to see. A short captures, but doesn’t hold you. A fifteen minute video does.
If you think I’m overselling it, there’s already a cryptocurrency for this. Basic Attention Token, built by the guy who created JavaScript. It measures how much attention you spend and pays you a cut. Raised $35 million in under a minute.
“BAT connects advertisers, publishers, and users and is denominated by relevant user attention.” — Basic Attention Token
Denominated. There’s a whitepaper. There’s a ledger. The commodity of attention has been priced and put on a market. Which shows something unprecedented is taking place that we’re still on the ground floor of.
What does the world look like when generations of people are living life with augmented and virtual reality headsets/eyewear on, gaming, gambling and gooning? The last one is a Gen Z term for one who obsesses over pornography.
Yes, I imagine people will be dating, mating and living their lives in a parallel digital world. And in some fashion getting paid for it.
I spent two innings watching this game on Apple Immersive Video and WOW. This is the future. I would swear I was in the on-deck circle. Hope everyone gets a chance to see a game like this! 🥽
Facebook/Meta tried to make it a thing, spending more than $80 billion on it and wound up failing miserably. It was so poorly constructed it feels like a money laundering scheme. I haven’t seen that much money result in so little production since California’s high-speed rail.
If the picture I painted sounds bleak, a dystopian future that blends WALL-E, Ready Player One and Idiocracy, know that we’ll have a choice in the matter.
A counterculture movement taking place today seeks to take back our time, attention, and energy from all that entangles us. Rawdogging Flights has become a meme, young men who will board flights across the country and instead of burying their heads in a tablet for six hours, they merely look at the flight tracker on the seatback screen in front of them and people watch, and think, and daydream.
One of the fastest-growing accounts on X is a book club that seeks to use classic literature as a way to combat modernism and all its attention-deficit inducing pitfalls. They’re currently reading The Brothers Karamazov. There’s another trend happening where people dive into The Count of Monte Cristo.
I also don’t believe this is merely an economics story. The battle taking place goes deeper than just being for our mind. The Church Fathers had a word for it long before these technologies existed — nepsis, watchfulness. Guarding your mind against the thoughts that wander in uninvited. They understood your attention is the doorway to your soul.
The modern world is designed to separate this from you all day, everyday, without you even realizing it.
Anyways — thank you for your time. You’ve earned .00001 BAT.
Earlier this week I asked, Where’s the Beef?, and mentioned how Trump’s plan to import 300,000 metric tons of beef from overseas at 25% below market value can offer a little relief to the symptoms, but doesn’t address the disease. Including how the big four meatpackers have a pseudo-monopoly on the game.
POTUS has responded to that this week. Not directly to me, but — Mr. President, if you have been checking the site, please read till the end.
It’s an important step, one that actually provides some relief to our ranchers. But not one that will be felt immediately (or on your next trip to the grocery store).
The Pro-Am Triple Crown is a stat I have been unofficially tracking in my football observing life for decades. It’s an incredibly rare achievement. The feat requires winning the Heisman Trophy, the National Championship, and then being selected first overall in the spring draft that follows.
To date there have been only five players to achieve this. Three of them within the last 15 years.
Cam Newton went 14-0 at Auburn in 2010, took the Heisman, beat Oregon for the BCS title, and went first overall to Carolina that April. Joe Burrow’s 2019 at LSU is the best season a quarterback has ever put on tape — 5,671 yards, 60 touchdown passes, 15-0, and a Heisman margin so wide it broke O.J. Simpson’s 1968 record. Cincinnati took him first the next spring. The passing game coordinator who built the juggernaut offense around him was Joe Brady, current head coach of the Buffalo Bills. Burrow was also the first LSU player to win the Heisman in sixty years. The third player to complete the trifecta this century is Fernando Mendoza, and we’ll get to him.
Which brings me to the other two, both from my beloved Fighting Irish.
Angelo Bertelli won the Heisman for Notre Dame in 1943 in six games. The Marines called him up after the Navy game in late October and his college career was over. The Irish won the national title anyway and the Boston Yanks took him first overall in 1944. He never played a down in the NFL. He deployed to Iwo Jima instead.
Six years later Leon Hart did it again for Frank Leahy. Undefeated 1949, consensus national champion, Heisman and Maxwell winner, first overall to Detroit in 1950. He’s still the last lineman to win the Heisman. Notre Dame has two of the five and both of the historical ones. Nobody else has more than one.
There have been a few players in recent years that hit all three objectives but did so over the course of multiple seasons. Jameis Winston won the Heisman and the title in the same year at Florida State in 2013 as a redshirt freshman, then played another season before entering the draft in 2015 to go first overall. O.J. Simpson has all three pieces — the 1967 title at USC in his first year on campus, the 1968 Heisman, first overall to Buffalo in 1969. Billy Cannon won LSU’s title in 1958 as a junior, took the 1959 Heisman, and went first overall to the Rams in 1960. And Ernie Davis was a sophomore on Syracuse’s 1959 championship team, led them in rushing and won Cotton Bowl MVP, then took the Heisman in 1961 as the first black player to win it and went first overall in 1962. Like Bertelli, he never played a professional down. Leukemia took him at just twenty-three years old.
Bryce Young has the three honors over multiple years, but my criteria requires being a starter at their position in the national championship season. He threw for 156 yards the entire 2020 season behind Mac Jones. Vinny Testaverde is out by the same rule — he redshirted in 1983 while Bernie Kosar won Miami a championship.
Bo Jackson is the one worth arguing about. Auburn went 11-1 in 1983 and beat Michigan in the Sugar Bowl playing the hardest schedule in the country. Miami vaulted from fifth to first after the Orange Bowl and took the AP, UPI, FWAA and coaches titles. Auburn got named champion by the New York Times computer poll, Billingsley, the CFRA and a few others, and Auburn now officially claims it. Pat Dye said his team would wear New York Times rings. So Bo has a Heisman, a first overall pick, and a national title that exists entirely at the discretion of whichever selector you feel like trusting. He also never signed with Tampa Bay.
And there’s a much longer list of players who have hit two-out-of-three. Baker Mayfield won the Heisman at Oklahoma in 2017 and went first overall to Cleveland in 2018, but Georgia bounced the Sooners in the Rose Bowl semifinal. Caleb Williams took it at USC in 2022 and went first overall to Chicago in 2024 — no title, and two years between the trophy and the pick. Carson Palmer won the 2002 Heisman and went first to Cincinnati in 2003 while Ohio State won the championship and USC finished fourth. Kyler Murray, Heisman at Oklahoma in 2018, first overall to Arizona in 2019, nothing else. Earl Campbell won the 1977 Heisman at Texas and went first to Houston in 1978, and it was Notre Dame that beat the Longhorns in the Cotton Bowl and took the title. Trevor Lawrence gets there from the other direction — title as a true freshman starter at Clemson in 2018, first overall to Jacksonville in 2021, but no Heisman. He finished second to DeVonta Smith in 2020.
And then there’s the reverse case: Johnny Lujack won the Heisman on Notre Dame’s undefeated 1947 championship team and missed the whole thing by three draft slots, because the Bears had already spent the fourth overall pick on him the year before.
The newest member to this exclusive club is Fernando Mendoza, fresh off one of the most incredible seasons in College Football history. A true Cinderella story, something that would have seemed only possible in a video game just three years ago. I know, because I saw Indiana play in person three years ago and the idea they were less than two years away from a Natty then is mind-blowing.
Mendoza is an interesting case, the jury is out on if he truly possesses what it takes to be a franchise quarterback in the NFL. The truth is, I’m not sure. Both sides make salient points in their arguments. What he becomes at the pro level remains to be seen. What I do know is that because of his personality, I will be rooting for him to succeed. He’s been clowned on for his overly kind and professional disposition in interviews and for his answers getting him the nickname ChatGPT. During his appearance on Monday Night Football in the preseason this year he referred to play-by-play man Joe Buck as Mr. Buck. I love the contrast this gives to Raider Nation. The Raiders have also been making moves that make the team more competitive, and dare I say more watchable.
“He is a bad dude, man. He’s what the Raiders need.” — Jon Gruden
Which leads me to a quick sidebar: I do this insane thing as a sports fan, I hope for teams, that I don’t hate, to become fun to watch. Sports are the ultimate content, and they should be enjoyable to follow. Sure, when it’s your team it’s a whole different vibe, but the rest of the games, I want to actually have the desire to tune in and be entertained. It helps when you’re watching great ensembles that honor the game by playing it with a high-level of execution, situational awareness and discipline. Sloppy football is not good content. I’ll cover which teams I think are going to be the most “fun” to watch this season in a future post. With a few teams to be included that may surprise you.
This offseason the Raiders added Mendoza, Tyler Linderbaum, my favorite center. Yes, I have a favorite center. He’s a monster in the middle from Iowa by way of the Ravens that should be a huge contributor to Mendoza’s odds of sticking around. They gave him three years and $81 million, which makes him the highest-paid interior offensive lineman in football. They tried to trade Maxx Crosby — and by tried I mean the deal was done, two first-round picks from Baltimore, before the Ravens failed him on a physical and walked away from it. They also signed linebackers Quay Walker and Nakobe Dean, edge rusher Kwity Paye, receiver Jalen Nailor, and Kirk Cousins on a one-year deal. They also welcome in a new head coach too, Klint Kubiak from Seattle, taking over a team that went 3-14. It looks like the Tom Brady Era in Las Vegas has officially begun.
My hope for the Raiders is they lose enough games to snag a top-five pick and land Jeremiah Smith, the Ohio State WR that is the best prospect at the position in years, drawing comparisons physically to Calvin Johnson. But with Kirk Cousins at the helm and an improved roster, that may be difficult for them to pull off. A big time receiver and a fortified offensive line would help Mendoza’s chances once he gets put into the fray.
And I don’t think they should rush it, letting him sit behind Cousins for the vast majority of the season and ending the year with 3-4 starts could be a much better way to bring him along than feeding him to the wolves right out of the gate the way franchises often do with top QB’s now.
The exclusivity of Mendoza’s accomplishment should be applauded, he has entered rarified air. And his attitude and disposition make it easy to do so.
This College Football season has a few potential contenders who could actually pull the Triple Crown off. Arch Manning at Texas, Julian Sayin at Ohio State, Dante Moore at Oregon, and my personal favorite, CJ Carr at Notre Dame — who opened as the betting favorite for the Heisman, for whatever that’s worth in August.
After beef prices hit another all-time high last week — ground beef at $6.89 a pound, an 83% climb since 2017 — President Trump has announced a plan to import 300,000 metric tons of ground beef from overseas, tariff-free for the next 90 days, to be brought into the market at a 25% discount below market price.
“We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25% below current market prices.” — President Donald Trump
It’s estimated that 12% of the population eats around half of the supply. I’m happy to be part of this dietary elite.
In the era of 5th Generation warfare, everything is the battlefield. The schools, the media, healthcare, and you absolutely better believe the food supply.
With greater attention being shown to the declining quality of our cuisine, RFK Jr.’s MAHA push, and Tucker Carlson openly referring to it as “goy-slop”, the movement has gone mainstream.
One of the biggest issues is the loss of small cattle ranchers. We’ve been losing over 21,000 independent cattle producers a year — call it 58 a day — and more than half of every beef operation that existed in 1980 is already gone.
Rep. Massie has been reminding everyone about his PRIME Act, which would let small producers use a local custom slaughterhouse and sell in-state. It would provide some relief but doesn’t go nearly far enough to course correct the cliff we’re heading towards. It also doesn’t touch labeling. We killed mandatory country of origin labels in 2015 because Canada and Mexico complained to the WTO.
The nation’s cattle supply is at its lowest point since 1951. 86.2 million head. The beef cow herd hasn’t been this small since 1961.
I understand President Trump is looking for short term relief heading into the midterms, but the need for comprehensive reform is a critical issue that without exaggeration has national security implications. More than a third of 17-to-24 year olds are ineligible to serve at least in part because of obesity, and 11% are disqualified on weight alone.
If the government subsidized grassfed beef the way they do corn we’d quite literally be far better off. And in many ways our entire food supply is already subsidized in a negative way.
There’s been no discussion about how much EBT raises the price of groceries for the rest of Americans.
The Battle of the Beef ties into the climate agenda and the WEF Great Reset. They’ve spent decades telling you how bad red meat is for your health, and how terrible cows are for the environment.
The fact that they’re so desperate to stop us from eating it tells me it’s probably the fountain of youth.
Remember Beyond Beef? And Impossible? At least we can claim victory over the collapsed value of those companies. And the closure of Kevin Hart’s Vegan restaurant chain.
The “consensus” on cholesterol is even being questioned now, with citizen-funded imaging studies out of Cholesterol Code turning up lean, high-LDL subjects with no detectable plaque. How far does the deception really go?
“I take a vitamin every day. It’s called a steak.” — Jim Harbaugh
Inflation, foreign investment, the big four meat processors and regulation have all led us to this point. Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef handle roughly 85% of the beef processed in this country, and two of the four are Brazilian owned. A country in decline struggles to feed its people, as does one under attack.
Generational debates are happening online about how much one should spend on lunch, and while frugality is always wise, being forced to eat literal slop because our monetary policy and agricultural industry are completely out of whack is nothing to be proud of.
I’m reminded of William Wallace in Braveheart, “squabbling for the scraps from Longshanks’ table.”
We were not founded to be a nation of subjugated fools, encouraging one another to cook their hamburger helper with beans instead of ground beef.
Europe has authorized cricket powder in bread, pasta, and pizza. NSF money is funding labs trying to engineer lettuce into mRNA delivery vehicles. And our own herd is being eaten alive from the inside by New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite we wiped out in the 1960s and then let walk right back up through Central America into Texas. That’s what closed the Mexican border to cattle for a year and pulled 795,000 head out of the supply. They’re all tied together with a common thread, and one that needs to be addressed.
It’s the Talking Heads concert film, shot by Jonathan Demme over three nights at the Pantages in Hollywood in December 1983. Frontman David Byrne walks out alone with a boom box and an acoustic guitar, and the band gets built one member at a time until it’s a nine-piece.
It had been rattling around the back of my head for years. ‘Greatest concert film ever made’, according to a lot of people with opinions I respected. But I’d never really gotten into the Talking Heads, so I never bothered. Then I saw a copy on sale for five bucks and it was time to finally take the plunge.
I wouldn’t say I was wrong about the Talking Heads. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had no negative view of them, I just failed to understand how influential they truly are.
Funny thing about David Byrne — he reads as a Gen X icon, though he’s a Baby Boomer who was born in Scotland, 1952.
A concert film is the intersection of two artists. You need the act operating at the height of its powers, and you need a director with enough restraint to understand he is not the star. His only job is to take what happened in that room and deliver in the best way possible to the theatrical or home-viewing audience. And get the sound right. That’s a big one.
That takes strength, because you have to remove most of yourself from the product. Scorsese doesn’t do that exactly — he’s right there on camera in The Last Waltz, asking questions. But that’s his thing and it works. The Last Waltz has been first on my list in this category for years.
“…of enormous energy, of life being lived at a joyous high.” —Roger Ebert
Seven years after this, Demme made The Silence of the Lambs, which landed Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Adapted Screenplay. The Big Five. Only two other films in history have done it. It Happened One Night (1934) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Demme knew, in 1983, to keep the cameras on the stage and leave himself out of it.
Now, before I say a word about the actual music, a disclaimer. I find written reviews of music absolutely preposterous. Word salad. They read like parodies of the music review business itself: Referring to an album as a “bluesy, whiskey-soaked rag mama rock opera” — it comes across as writers spinning nonsense to describe a thing you can only get by hearing it yourself. The best you can do is tell people it’s good and advise them to go experience it for themselves. Everything past that comes out clunky and pretentious. Go read any Rolling Stone album review and you’ll see what I mean.
So with that out of the way, here’s what stood out.
Byrne has said himself that he’s somewhere on the spectrum. Watch him for five minutes and it stops being a question. That is in no way used pejoratively. The man is a certified autistic/artistic genius, and he joins a list in that regard I keep that also includes Michael Jackson, Axl Rose and Kanye West. Autist being another term that is not used lightly or to be framed as derogatory. I’m referring to those possessing actual genius.
The show is constructed visually, sonically, and with a songwriting range that shows craftsmanship and control. Song after song I’d sit there thinking, “Holy shit, this is a Talking Heads song too?” Having never fully explored their catalog on my own, I badly underestimated how deeply their DNA runs through popular music and culture.
And speaking of Kanye — the suit. That absurd broad-shouldered architectural monstrosity Byrne climbs into in the back half of the film. Decades later Kanye and Lil Pump built an entire video around it, the two of them shuffling down a hallway inside giant square shoulders. I don’t consider it as a coincidence, I see it as homage.
The version of genius people usually mean by “idiot savant” is narrow. One thing, done inhumanly well, and not much else. Byrne is the other kind. He calls on a dozen different influences and styles and makes them cohere into one thing. As a writer, I sometimes refer to myself as an idiom savant.
He is not, however, an autist at the highest order. Byrne is very left-leaning, and American Utopia — the 2018 album, then the Broadway show, then the Spike Lee film — is pro-immigration with a side of activism. While he is extremely talented, he does not reach the utmost levels of intellectual transcendence of a Stanley Kubrick or a Bobby Fischer.
The Dodgers empire may be coming apart at the seams.
“Prosecutors are investigating whether Walter’s businesses hid financial ties while borrowing billions from insurers he controls.” — Reuters
After the surprising sale of the Los Angeles Lakers last week, it now looks as though Mark Walter may need to divest himself of the Los Angeles Dodgers as well. The club says he has no plans to sell. He also had no plans to sell the Lakers ten months ago.
The situation is in the early stages, and there is serious bias in the coverage of it so far. I do remember a President of the United States who caught 34 felonies in New York, and then caught a separate half-billion dollar civil judgment for ‘inflating the value of his assets’ to get better terms on his loans — a farcical judgment an appeals court later threw out. Inflated collateral, concealed connections. Same neighborhood of accusations. The difference is that the Walter case appears to be actually substantive and not just politically motivated lawfare.
The Mark Walter situation is nuts and it's becoming a real question of whether he's going to need to sell the Dodgers to help raise $20 billion needed to pay back loans (Full story/explanation in first reply) pic.twitter.com/yjpoa3hwS1
The Dodgers having to sell isn’t the biggest story. It’s the Guggenheim group’s stake in their TV rights deal that makes this very interesting. If this is true, and it ends up costing the Dodgers their $334 million annual local television revenue, it shakes up the hierarchy of Major League Baseball immediately.
Also interesting is that Shohei Ohtani has a clause in his contract that should GM Andrew Friedman leave the team, or the ownership group change, he can opt out of his contract the following offseason.
“Ohtani can opt out if Walter is no longer controlling owner or Friedman no longer runs baseball ops.” — ESPN
Los Angeles also owes north of a billion dollars in deferred salary money to players on the team after their contracts end. That may not be a huge issue now, but if revenues are shared more evenly in the future that could become a burden to the new owners.
This only serves to add fuel to the fire for owners who desperately want a salary cap this offseason in their labor dispute with the MLBPA.
Currently the smaller-revenue teams can coast on the league’s welfare check before they spend a dime from ticket sales or local TV. They’d like a bigger cut of the pie than they’re getting, and they’re willing to institute a salary floor to get the players on board. The new CBA only needs 23 of the league’s 30 owners to approve it. If enough of the smaller fish band together and force this issue, things get very interesting. This incident could take out the ownership of the biggest financial juggernaut in the sport before the deepest parts of the CBA battle come to pass. The owners don’t care as much about leveling the competition and competitive balance as they do increasing their franchise valuations. That’s exactly what a salary cap would provide for them.
Los Angeles achieving a three-peat this fall with another World Series title would be historic and impressive regardless of the payroll, but it may also be their last chance to do so in the league’s current framework.
With the players and owners speaking different languages in early stage CBA negotiations, this tectonic shift occuring right at this time feels like another reason we may not see baseball played in 2027. The dynamics may be in such a state a flux that a reconcilliation becomes even more difficult to arrive at.
I’m counting down the five biggest crisis situations in College Football. This isn’t the worst overall programs. This factors in failing to meet expectations, mismanagement, financial and conference status, consistent losing, scandals, and falling from grace. These are situations that are faltering in the ever changing landscape of college football. Some have more viable paths back to success than others.
Honorable Mention: Michigan State
Three head coaches in four years. They fired Mel Tucker for cause in 2023 with $79 million left on his deal, a designation he’s still suing to overturn. Then they gave Jonathan Smith seven years and fired him after two, eating $32.5 million. Then they replaced him with Pat Fitzgerald, two years out of the game after Northwestern fired him amid a hazing scandal.
And I still see Fitzgerald as a potentially stabilizing force with upside. He won 110 games in Evanston with none of the resources he’ll have now.
They’ll be fine either way. Big Ten full shares averaged nearly $80 million in 2024-25 and Michigan State collects that annually. Conference status is their saving grace. The Spartans can eat the $32.5 million they owe Smith, but if Tucker settles for as much as that or more, things get a little hairy. It’s not all doom and gloom in East Lansing, but the gap between the Spartans and the Wolverines, Buckeyes, Nittany Lions, and Hoosiers has only grown wider. Not to mention how much further the additions of USC, Washington and Oregon drop them down the conference pecking order.
#5 Florida State
The ACC fell behind. Its schools pull in the mid-forties per year while the Big Ten and SEC each clear $70 million, so Florida State sued its own conference to get out early. They settled in March 2025 — a bigger cut of the ESPN money, exit fee cut to $165 million and dropping to $75 million by 2030-31, media rights included on the way out. They bought themselves a door.
The problem is there may not be a room on the other side. The Big Ten only admits AAU members — Miami got in in 2023, along with North Carolina, Duke, Virginia and Pitt. Florida State isn’t one. The SEC doesn’t need them either, since Florida already owns the state, and Finebaum’s read is they’d rather have UNC and Virginia. And if the SEC does want to expand its footprint into Florida, Miami is the more lucrative option.
The football has matched the finances. No bowl game since 2018. Third head coach in three years after Troy Taylor was fired and Frank Reich filled in for a season. Andrew Luck runs the program as general manager now, and Tavita Pritchard, a first-time head coach, runs the team. CFN projects the worst quarterback situation in the conference.
The alumni network is the counterargument, and it is a real one. Stanford graduates founded the world we live in today: Google, Nike, Netflix and Instagram, and the list goes on. The university sits on an endowment north of $37 billion. There is more capital in that donor base than in any five athletic departments combined.
It hasn’t mattered. Money moves toward things people want to be part of, and right now nobody wants to be part of Stanford football. Admissions standards don’t bend for a $23 million roster market. The travel doesn’t shorten. The media share doesn’t change until the next decade, and by then their best case scenario may be a spot in the Big 12. They are one of the big losers of the Pac-12 collapse, but not as big as the next team.
#3 Oregon State
This is the Pac-12 collapse’s biggest casualty. Ten schools left, Oregon State and Washington State were not invited anywhere, and the two of them kept the conference name and rebuilt it with Mountain West level teams. The 2026 Pac-12 is Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, San Diego State, Texas State, Utah State and Gonzaga for basketball.
On the field it has been worse. Oregon State went 2-10 last year. They fired Trent Bray at 0-7, the worst start since 1991, and the school said the roughly $4 million buyout would come out of donor money. That is a program passing the hat to fire its own coach. JaMarcus Shephard, a 42-year-old first-time head coach, takes over. This was a top-ten team in 2023.
On a personal note, I grew up a Pac-10 kid, and I’m glad to see the name live on. The conference may end up being one of the most exciting top to bottom in the FBS. But that doesn’t change the reality of the business side of things.
For a school that was spurned by the Big 12, their prospects for a better situation in the next round of realignment look meek. A dominant run in the new Pac-12 is their best hope to return to some form of national relevance.
#2 North Carolina
The Tar Heels made a splash last offseason with the hiring of NFL GOAT, eight-time Super Bowl winner, Bill Belichick. BB was given his “mutual” separation with the Patriots after a string of strange decisions, like having a defensive coordinator coach the offense, regressing Mac Jones from year two on, and missing the playoffs two years running, among a host of other issues.
I love Bill Belichick. I know that’s not a common sentiment from most fans, or even the media. I liked his surly press conferences and his casual trolling. I found him to be extremely entertaining, even if that was never his intention. The Boston sports media does not share that sentiment. They haven’t stopped dancing on his NFL head coaching grave since he left town.
After being passed over for the Falcons job, Coach Belichick spent a season in media, making weekly appearances on the Pat McAfee show and hosting his own podcast on YouTube. In each of these appearances there was a real sense that BB was attempting to rehab his image for one more crack at holding the reins for an NFL team. He sits just 15 wins away from Coach Shula’s record of 347.
He shocked the world by agreeing to a five year deal with the Tar Heels, but it conveniently included a reasonable opt out fee if he got an NFL offer after one year. The buyout was $10 million before June 1, 2025, and $1 million after. He brought in self-diagnosed football genius Michael Lombardi, his son Steve as defensive coordinator after a year as Washington’s DC, and perhaps most notoriously his 24 year old girlfriend Jordon Hudson.
After a horrendous first year on the field, and banning the Patriots from scouting players in person, his promise to be the 33rd NFL team that would prepare players for the league better than any other school in the nation looks thin. UNC finished 4-8 and had zero players drafted, ending a streak of at least one Tar Heel selected every year since 2016.
North Carolina may have a bright future if they’re able to exit the ACC for the Big Ten in 2031, but that will be long after the short term pain being induced upon them right now. If UNC fires him without cause after this season, they owe him the balance of the guarantee through December 2027 — one year, $10 million.
The question of whether Chapel Bill still has it in him to produce a winner the Belichick way is one of my favorite storylines going into the season. Game one in Dublin, Ireland on August 29th against a TCU team that dog-walked them last year will have the eyes of the college football world upon it, and it can’t get here soon enough.
#1 Colorado
What can be said about this program that Jason Whitlock hasn’t already called out? Deion came over from Jackson State with a head full of steam. He brought Shedeur and Travis Hunter as his top holdovers from Jackson, and the “Louis” luggage he had jump in the portal. They stormed out to a 3-0 start, including a big season opening win on the road at TCU, and then the wheels fell off and they limped out to a 4-8 record. Reports came out from former players about the standoffish nature of Coach Prime Time, refusing to even speak to a significant portion of them.
In his second year they had their best record of his tenure at 9-4 and an Alamo Bowl loss to BYU. That might not sound great to you, but it was in fact enough to get two-way star Hunter the Heisman trophy. And as far as accomplishments for Deion in his time at CU, that’s the highwatermark, and frankly, nothing to sneeze at.
It appeared the CU move was just an attempt to get Shedeur into the NFL. ESPN did the best they could to assist with that, hyping him as QB 1A of the draft. Shedeur fell to the fifth round where he was selected by the Cleveland Browns, who had already selected Dillon Gabriel in the third round of that same draft. Shedeur’s time in Cleveland is well documented. I felt he held onto the ball for far too long in college to be a viable NFL starter, and some of those bad habits continue to plague his game today. Hunter was taken second overall by the Jags, who let him play both offense and defense his rookie season until he was hurt. He looked undersized in the NFL.
The run by the two athletes was enough to get their jersey numbers retired in Boulder. A move that would have been palatable had it only been Hunter’s. It seemed like Deion would mentally and emotionally check out after Shedeur moved on. He spent the CU offseason dealing with a bladder cancer issue, had a new bladder constructed, and returned in time for the start of the season. A disappointing one as the Buffs ended with a 3-9 record and won a single Big 12 game. Sanders enters year 4 having signed a five-year, $54 million extension in March 2025 that pays him an average of $10.8 million per year, making him the highest paid coach in the Big 12.
Footage has come out of Colorado’s fall camp practices this month, and the players looked extremely undersized.
𝗧𝗥𝗘𝗡𝗗𝗜𝗡𝗚: The Colorado Football team has gone viral for looking like a Youth Football team during practice.
The Buffaloes' players look concerningly skinny and extremely small.
In response to the negative publicity, CU placed a comprehensive gag order on reporters attending practice. They were not allowed to report on anything, that’s right, anything they saw at the session. The email read that nothing observed may be reported, published, posted, broadcast or otherwise shared in any form, on any platform, at any time, and that if you’re uncertain whether something is reportable, the answer is that it is not. If that wasn’t enough bad publicity, footage was then released of their female strength and conditioning coach giving a folksy, “y’all” laced speech to hype up the team that went over like a description of Linda Blair in The Exorcist at the family dinner table.
Powerful: Colorado’s female strength and conditioning coach Morgen Cote has gone viral for her motivational speech to the team.
"I don’t do this for the love of the game. I do this for the love of y’all."
The Big 12 is underfunded compared to the big two conferences. Their conference wide Monster Energy jersey patch sponsor is $20 million for the entire league, which comes out to about a million a school. Notre Dame’s SoFi patch is worth $18 to $20 million for just them. Yes, the Fighting Irish patch is equal to the entirety of the Big 12.
NIL is part of the issue, but it doesn’t make it any less real. Deion thrived when it was hype and swagger and attitude that sold young men on the program. Now years of missed expectations, excuses, and negative stories have soured prospects on calling Boulder home, and when they can’t match the checks being written by mid to bottom tier Big Ten schools, it’s easy to see why.
I expect this to be Deion’s last season on the sidelines. If he makes it through the year, he can agree to a buyout, step down due to “health reasons,” and sign a lucrative deal with ESPN to be featured on College GameDay where he can be a well-compensated media personality. Which is one of the things I believe he does best. His segments on NFL Network were usually very enjoyable. Back when they had the dream team of Marshall Faulk, Warren Sapp, Michael Irvin, Kurt Warner and Steve Mariucci. The program was actually fun, entertaining and informative. Contrast that with the media slop offered up by ESPN. Suffice to say, Deion, the Buffaloes, and ESPN may all be the better for this being his rocky mountain swan song.
I met Jimbo on my first trip to Colorado. The trip was to visit a buddy from High School who was enlisted and stationed at the Air Force Academy. Jimbo was still active duty Air Force at the time we met. If you’ve seen The Big Lebowski, his aura was much aligned with The Dude’s.
We picked him up before heading to Denver for a Rockies game. Me and three airmen made the trip in a Chrysler sedan. The guys had a pony keg from a gathering the night before with about a third of the beer still in it, and they dressed it up to look like a little kid in the middle of the back seat. It had a Rockies hat set on the tap and a Rockies jersey buttoned up around the keg.
I sat up front and didn’t drink any of the beer on the ride, but the boys in the back took the occasional pull from the tap.
On the way there I came up with a game called “Rock n Roll Draft” where we took turns drafting musicians to build out our dream lineup, and then debated afterwards whose was best. I remember drafting Chris Robinson and Keith Richards, the rest of the lineup escapes me.
Jimbo was later deployed to Afghanistan, where he worked as a medic. He had a fiancée at the time. He’d sent her an iPad and a phone, and a few other gifts. A few months into his deployment he found out she had been stepping out on him, and he broke things off. It was a serious detriment to his morale, but as Jimbo does, he carried on.
Speaking of breaking things off, I asked him about the weirdest injuries he saw during his stint in the middle east. He mentioned a man who had been having carnal relations with a female colleague at the air base and had broken his penis during the act. I immediately felt better about having only broken my forearm, my clavicle and my nose.
Jimbo was an avid reader. He had read every Stephen King release, and over 30 of them on that deployment alone. The pace having quickened after his engagement fell through.
He got back to Colorado and finished his time and was honorably discharged. He then used his GI Bill to attend HVAC, heavy equipment, and plumbing trade schools. But after completing them, he wanted to lay low for awhile. He grew out his beard and slept on my buddy’s recliner every night for a year in the house he was renting in Manitou Springs. He even dated the waitress at the Irish Pub we all had a crush on. My friend in the Air Force and I took a road trip back to California, and Jimbo came along for the ride. He was that sort of feller. I called him our Kramer.
We went to see Furthur, one of the Grateful Dead lineups post Jerry Garcia, and he passed out in front of me and hit his head. Me and my buddy had to pick him up by the arms and legs like a lifeless corpse we were throwing overboard. He came to in the midst of us walking him out of the floor area of the arena in Broomfield, CO. He was fine, but in all the concerts I’ve been to, I’ve seen numerous people pass out, yet had never been with someone who had done so themselves. Well, the law of averages caught up with us that day.
Then at the end of spring, that buddy of mine got out of the Air Force and moved out of state to cash-in on his GI bill. Jimbo knew it was time to return home and get a job, but he wanted one more Colorado summer before doing so.
I was in college at the time, working nights and weekends at a pizza place, and I couldn’t let him stay with me. But I got him a job delivering pizzas at the shop. His tenure there actually outlived mine. The manager was happy to have an honest and reliable employee that showed up for his shifts.
Jimbo took to living in his car to get the last Rocky Mountain summer in. There was a learning curve as he transitioned to vehicular life. The shop had a big stainless steel dishpit, and when it was empty, he’d use the drop down sprayer to wash his hair. I told him that wasn’t the best idea for a restaurant, and he ended up getting a membership at 24 Hour Fitness where he could shower, hang out, and watch cable TV. I don’t think he exercised there.
After he finished his shift at the pizza shop, he’d take his cash and get some food, then head over to the mall parking lot. He’d trap towels and t-shirts in between the windows and the door frame to create curtains. He said he’d then “get really high” and read until he fell asleep. He never had any trouble from cops or mall security.
It’s easy to look at some of the behaviors and label him a loser or a bum, but he was also a genuinely good guy who could always be relied upon when you needed a favor in return. He honored the bro code. He wasn’t ever the reason anyone out with him had a bad time. He never stepped on anyone’s toes. And he had a funny way of telling his stories from overseas and his upbringing.
He had a great mind for frugality — he had many stories from trips to Vegas and Reno, getting free drinks and discounted rooms. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of sports, which was a big anchor of our friendship. And he had the stomach to handle and the appetite for sports betting back when the only place you could legally do so was in the state of Nevada.
The subtle art of sneaking down into better seats at a sporting event was another of his specialties, and he was always interested in a scheme on how to do so. At the Rockies game we had two good tickets, and then bought two $4 Rockpile centerfield bleacher seats. Two of us went down into the good seats with the good tickets, one came up with both tickets, brought another guy down with him, then repeated it so all four of us were a few rows behind the dugout. This works at Rockies games, but it gets trickier in a place with regular sellouts.
If you asked him anything about his life, he’d just come right out and tell you, he didn’t withhold details even when they were to the detriment of his image. Jimbo had lost his mom at a young age, and some felt he was out searching for that place that would feel like coming home.
He was a Mets fan with a Yankees tattoo. He reminded me of the song “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33” by Kris Kristofferson:
He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.
He was something of a millennial cowboy that summer, a free spirit on the Front Range, taking each day as it came, holding off the impending responsibilities of adulthood just a little bit longer. The way I saw it, after six years serving his country and being deployed in a war zone, it certainly wasn’t for me to tell him to approach things any differently.
All of this was jogged loose in my memory after seeing a Subaru Outback with the back seat folded down this afternoon, and it brought to my mind that summer of freedom ol’ Jimbo got to live years ago.
I lost touch with him a few years back, but I hope the cool breeze finally guided him to a place that feels like home.
Many people who I admire as intelligent thinkers and creative minds suffer from a key blind spot I see occurring repeatedly. From Andrew Torba, Jay Dyer and Sam Hyde — they all carry a condition I describe as Bitcoin Brain. Or as the crypto community outside the Bitcoin bubble refers to them, Bitcoin Maxis.
Through this condition, which as it appears to me is caused by having bought into Bitcoin, or BTC, at a significantly lower price, realized 50-200x gains on the asset, and now have a devotion to it that causes all criticism of it to put them into a state of cognitive dissonance.
Just mentioning use cases for other cryptocurrency projects can trigger an adverse reaction. Bring up ISO 20022-compliant utility tokens in a social setting and you’ll more often than not hook a maxi who will launch into a myopic BTC fueled diatribe that lays out several of the arguments I’ll counter in this article.
To be clear, this is not financial advice. Nothing here is a price prediction. We could see a $200k, $300k, $400k Bitcoin, depending on how much institutional money comes into the asset in the near term.
Price is not the argument I’m making. What I’m interested in is the shifting paradigm — that a first generation technology from 2009, one that is slower, more expensive, and has fewer real world uses than what came after it, is still being sold to us as a revolutionary force in the future of global finance.
There is a maximum supply cap of twenty-one million Bitcoins. This is often one of the first points made by the champions of the token, scarcity.
There is a finite amount of gold. There is a finite amount of silver. There is a finite amount of beachfront property in Malibu. And there is a finite amount of Bitcoin. All four of those are true, but one of these things is not like the other.
Gold is scarce because it can’t be manufactured. You cannot copy the periodic table, change one line, and roll out Gold 2 with an extra 21 million tons.
There are other cryptos. And it isn’t just that they exist — it’s that they already do things Bitcoin is technologically incapable of doing. Foreign exchange that happens damn near instantly. Payments that settle across the world in seconds for a fraction of a penny. Commodities trading around the clock with a record of every transaction that’s open for anyone to inspect and impossible to go back and doctor.
So sure, you could build Bitcoin 2 and mint yourself another 21 million tokens. But why would you want to? You’d be launching a brand new product that’s already a generation behind the competition. Nobody would give it a second look.
And that says something very damning about the asset.
The original pitch, the one that made every libertarian I know fall in love, was peer-to-peer electronic cash outside the money printing governments and their fiat system.
It doesn’t do that and it never really did. Transactions take ten minutes to confirm and about an hour before anyone serious calls them final, fees float on congestion, and nobody is buying a latte with it.
The fix that BTC developers promised for eight years running has been the Lightning Network, where payments happen off-chain and settle in bulk later. On paper it solves the problem in an inefficient way. In practice, the node count continues to decrease, inhibiting its ability to ever operate at scale. But as is often the case with Bitcoin, the goal posts have already been moved. The pitch now is that it’s a “store of value,” not currency, not a payments network. When has a store of value been so volatile?
While we’re doing inventory, there’s the matter of what’s been buying all this. Tether is the largest stablecoin on earth and for years people have wondered whether every digital dollar it issues actually is backed by a real one. The stablecoins can then be used in transactions to trade for Bitcoin.
In 2021 that got answered twice. New York settled with them over misrepresenting the backing, and the CFTC found Tether had enough actual cash to cover the tokens on about a quarter of the days they examined.
“Tether reserves were not ‘fully-backed’ the majority of the time.” — CFTC
They paid, admitted nothing, and publish quarterly reports now. But it’s why, every time the market rips and somebody notices Tether minted another billion the week before, people get squinty. Bitcoin Maxis have frequently responded to this by saying some variation of, “if the Federal Reserve can print money, why can’t we?” These are supposed to be the adults in the room in the blockchain space?
That era is ending anyway. The GENIUS Act puts stablecoins under real federal rules by January 2027 — dollar-for-dollar reserves and audited books. What happens when Bitcoin’s money printer gets shut off?
This is part of the new arc for Bitcoin. It was the money you didn’t need permission to use. Now its loudest defenders spend their days begging Fortune 500 companies to put it on their balance sheets and are lobbying Washington to stockpile it.
Bitcoin has the earmarks of a brand-name, trillion-dollar pump and dump, and it traces back to its strange origins and the host of shady players acting on its behalf.
JUST IN: MicroStrategy is now ranked the #1 corporate seller of Bitcoin after SELLING another $216 million in Bitcoin.
Just last year, Strategy CEO Michael Saylor was urging investors to take out double mortgages to buy Bitcoin at the $124,000+, and promised his company would…
Michael Saylor’s pitch boils down to: who cares what it costs today when it’s going to be worth millions later? He’s even put a number on it.
“Every Bitcoin you don’t buy today is going to cost you $13 million.” — Michael Saylor
That isn’t an argument. It’s a forecast, and you’re expected to take his word for it.
Saylor is also not a new character, which is the part nobody brings up. In March of 2000, at the peak of dot-com mania, his company announced it had to restate two years of financials. The stock went from $333 a share to $86 in a single day.
Twenty-five years later he runs the same company under a new name and has bet all of it on one asset. Strategy holds roughly 840,000 Bitcoin (4% of the total possible supply) at an average cost around $75,000 a coin. Bitcoin is currently in the low $60Ks.
He also said for six straight years that he would never sell, that anyone who sells is weak. This month’s filing shows him selling Bitcoin to buy back his own preferred stock.
The engine that made the whole thing work was the premium. His stock traded at a big multiple to the Bitcoin behind it, so he could print shares, buy coins, and somehow end up with more Bitcoin per share than he started with. That premium is gone.
Since Oct. 2025, Strategy spent almost $17B buying Bitcoin. Yet despite that support, the price fell by 53%. If Bitcoin was that weak with Strategy buying $17B, imagine how much weaker it will be with Strategy selling $3.25B, plus more to maintain its minimum U.S. dollar reserve.
Then there’s Satoshi Nakamoto. That’s the name on the whitepaper that started all of this back in 2008. He built the thing, ran it for two years, answered questions on message boards, then stopped writing in 2011 and was never heard from again. Nobody knows who he is. Nobody knows if he’s one person or several.
He also has about a million coins that he mined himself in the early days, roughly five percent of every Bitcoin that will ever exist. Sixty-some billion dollars. It has not moved in fifteen years. The price has gone through the roof four separate times and he never touched a dime of it.
Three ways to explain that. He lost the keys, he’s dead, or he isn’t a person at all.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the secret founder of Bitcoin, has a wallet with 1 million Bitcoin that has not been touched in 15 years. It's worth $70 billion today. It's the biggest untouched fortune of all time. That's insane.
In 1996, twelve years before any of this, the NSA published a paper called “How to Make a Mint: The Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash.” It walks through how you’d go about building an untraceable digital currency. They also designed the mathematical lock the whole system still runs on.
That’s not proof of anything. But if you’re asking who could invent a global currency, launch it, walk away and never once get caught, the list is short and they’re on it.
Here’s why that matters beyond being a fun theory. If Satoshi is a man, five percent of the supply is a mystery. If Satoshi is an agency, five percent of the supply is a loaded gun. Sit on it for thirty years while the thing gets baked into pension funds and corporate balance sheets and the national reserve, then wake up the wallet and cash in.
The mother of all rug pulls. And you’d never see it coming, because you never knew who was holding it.
The founder of the world’s most valuable monetary network being permanently and conveniently missing gets filed by his followers as epic mythology, not as the enormous red flag it is.
Along those lines, in 2014 Jeffrey Epstein put about half a million into Blockstream’s seed round, the company employing some of the most influential contributors to Bitcoin’s code. He also cut MIT a check that landed in 2015, right when the Bitcoin Foundation went broke and the developers maintaining the code had no employer. The lab picked up three of them.
“I have spoken to some of the founders of Bitcoin who are very excited.” — Jeffrey Epstein
Nobody involved has been accused of wrongdoing, and none of this means Epstein controlled Bitcoin. But at the most fragile moment in the network’s history — no foundation, no money, a handful of guys with the keys to the codebase — the man paying the bills was Jeffrey Fucking Epstein?
How could a decentralized, borderless currency be an asset to someone running an international human trafficking and blackmail ring?
Then there’s the quantum problem. Google researchers put out estimates this year suggesting a quantum computer could crack Bitcoin’s security faster than the network can produce a single block. Roughly a third of all coins are sitting in the kind of accounts where that’s a live concern, ‘Satoshi’s’ included.
So a proposal went up in April to phase out the vulnerable accounts and eventually freeze the coins of anyone who doesn’t move theirs in time.
Freeze the accounts. The unchangeable ledger with the rules nobody can touch is now having a public argument about icing out a third of the supply. They have once again lost the plot.
So where does this land? Two of BTC’s biggest problems, transaction cost and speed, are already solved. Just not by Bitcoin.
Wrap it, or tokenize it, and settle it on a distributed ledger built for payments and it clears in seconds for a fraction of a penny. The XRP Ledger does it, Stellar does it, and DTCC has already named both in its tokenization patent.
Bitcoin Maxis prefer to position it as the only crypto that will be left standing, keeping the blinders up is key, because the world realizing its limitations is a pitfall that shatters the illusion.
And when it happens, the price of Bitcoin will no longer be what drives the asset class at large.
Bitcoin being decoupled from the rest of the cryptocurrency space as the real-world adoption of utility coins (things that actually solve trillion-dollar problems) leads the way will spark one of the largest mass-hysteria events we’ve seen as Bitcoin Maxis attempt to rationalize what has come to pass.
Bitcoin has been a mainstream media marketing campaign. It has been a successful red herring designed to avert the attention of the masses while the rails of a new financial system using distributed ledger, smart contract and blockchain technology are being built with little fanfare outside of the crypto sphere. (Make no mistake, the smart money is not going to miss the boat on this.)
It’ll most likely always be around. As I stated, it may shatter through all-time-highs in the interim, but there will be a paradigm shift.
There is serious institutional, political, and potentially dark-money pressure to continue propping up the mirage. But in the end, I do believe Bitcoin will be remembered at best as the VCR of cryptocurrency, at worst as a multi-trillion dollar capital extraction conspiracy.
