On The Brink with Castle Island - Weekly Roundup 07/28/23 (Market Structure bill advances, stablecoin catch-22, debanking in the UK) (EP.441)

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

Matt and Nic are back with another week of news and deals. In this episode:  Nic's issues editing the show Why Washington is attacking PoR  Why Big 4 audit firms aren't working on PoR  The Financial Innovation and Technology in the 21st Century bill (FIT) passes out of committee in the House  Six Democrats defect and support the bill The Stablecoin bill reaches an impasse because the White House  Why stablecoins being limited to the banks is a paradox  The SEC settles with Quantstamp SBF gets a gag order because he released Caroline Ellison's diaries  SBF did actually pay for his legal defense with stolen FTX customer money  The UK gets embroiled in a banking scandal due to Nigel Farage  We digest the room temperature ambient pressure superconductor news  Nic's pickleball injury   Content mentioned:  Nic in Fortune, The crypto industry is embracing self regulation. It's time Washington gets on board   Kathleen Breitman in Fortune, Ben McKenzie needs a hug: The 'OC' star's crypto book is an ill-informed flop   Sponsor notes:  Coin Metrics STATE OF THE NETWORK - From Orange Groves to Orange Gold  In this special edition of State of the Network, we are excited to share a new report that translates the legal language of securities framework for digital assets into objective, measurable criteria from "on-chain" data  

Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of Concentuteeasing. You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin.

Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Matt Walsh. And I'm Nick Carter. And this episode is brought you by Coin Metrics. And here is the Metrics Minute. Today's Metrics minute is brought you by Coin Metrics. Coin Metrics recently published a new report using on-chain data to evaluate the U.S. securities framework into objective criteria. According to SEC guidance, tokens alleged to securities represent $80 billion in market cap. 7% of the crypto market cap, about 500 billion or 44% of the market is indeterminate.

In the report, CM uses on-chain metrics to evaluate some prongs of Howie. Now looking at adoption figures, this week, active addresses among majors were up only on Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, and Ethereum Classic for some reason. Transfer value among major crypto assets was up only on Dogecoin. A few stable coins were also up as well, Binance USD, die, tether gold and Gemini dollar, which had a big pop. The standouts for this week in transactions where Dogecoin and Bitcoin cash with a 97 and 130% increase in on-chain transactions, respectively. That's your metrics minute. I like this coin metrics report. So we put it in our newsletter.

So check out the coin metrics substack here. So it's called from orange groves to orange gold, can on-chain metrics determine which cryptocurrencies are securities? We've seen some attempts at this over the years, but everyone forgets that the person whose job it is to say whether or not something is a security, in his mind, that's Gary Gensler. And he just says they're all securities except for Bitcoin. Yeah, so the question is, can revealed empirical data about the distribution and the usage of the coin exculpated it. And in the case of Ethereum, I would say arguably that is the case, like they did an ICO that look like an unregistered security is offering over time the distribution, well, frankly, the coin became very distributed. You can tell by looking on-chain.

The foundation has a lesser influence over the coin these days. So I think it's definitely plausible to say, yeah, we can look at the actual usage on-chain metrics and find a piece of the puzzle as to whether it's a security or not. It's not the whole puzzle for sure. But we do need the SEC to even be willing to consider the analysis, which right now they're not. I don't think so. Don't think they're willing to. Well, it was a good week for Castle Island content. Ria sat down with Richard Meisner of SAFE to discuss account to abstraction, hybrid custody,

and a number of other topics. This one was probably the worst mic I've ever heard on a Castle Island podcast. This guy just had a terrible audio set up. I mean, look, we don't want to discredit our own podcast. here but all I'm saying is if you're a crypto zillionaire why don't you spend $500 and buy Mike just don't talk into what do you think he was talking into a trash bag so like he was inside a large conch shell was what I was getting so here's free alpha free by the sure SM7B Mike that's the one you hear these dulcet

tones right now Matt that's where they're coming from the sure SM7 B. I know. I need to get my mic game better. I have the older shore and I don't have one of those covers. Yeah. I mean, look, yours is okay, but there's always, you can always aspire to something better. So if you're a crypto person that does more than two podcasts or appearances a year, just buy the mic. It's just a great investment. Makes you sound a lot better. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's an excuse these days for using AirPods or whatever on your podcasts. No, don't use AirPods. So, um, sorry, make a mark there.

Sometimes we make a mistake and our podcast editor, who happens to be me, forgets to edit out the mistake. So we could either make fewer mistakes or I could be a more diligent editor. Those are both two sort of options. The problem is I edited the whole podcast last week and my laptop crashed when I was done. and I didn't save it. So then I had to do it again, but the second time I was like,

ah, screw this, this sucks. You just mail my. So I just wasn't as good, thus leading to the finished product that you heard, which wasn't, was inferior.

It sounded like I might have Tourette syndrome. We usually try to edit those out. I mean, some podcasts, they don't, they just stream it and they just, you know, publish it out there to the ether.

That could be us. They don't make mistakes. Don't make mistakes. Sometimes we see. say really insightful things and sometimes we say really, I don't know, explosive things that we would later cut because we're like, oh, we can't say that. Yeah, I mean, the cutting room floor for this pot, that would be interesting if we did assembled our bloopers and excessively antagonistic things we've said over the years. Yeah, I think we usually cut most of them, but we'll

get there. Well, what I was about to say was you wrote an article for fortune. So, It was called the crypto industry is embracing self-regulation. It's time for Washington to get on board. Yeah, this was the first one for me in Fortune. Thank you to the team for giving me a home. Thanks for publishing me. Basically, it's about proof reserves. And my point is, like, look, proof reserves is happening at the state level.

It's happening overseas. This thing is a real accounting procedure. Why doesn't Washington get on board? And people might ask, okay, well, why do you even need Washington? Why can you just do proof of reserves? That's true. You can. Anyone can just do proof reserves.

However, for it to be credible, you probably need an audit firm to oversee it and just ratify that you've done it correctly. Unfortunately, we're not in a perfect world. Not everything is trustless in crypto economic. Something still depend on traditional assurance methods. So I think generally need a accounting firm to kind of rubber stamp the approved reserve. Here's the problem. Certain members of Congress, you can probably guess, kind of key crypto antagonists, have actually been leading a campaign via the accounting firms, the regulators for the accounting firms,

kind of just stymie the crypto industry. One of the things is proof of reserve. So given the proof reserves makes the industry better, that's antithetical to the Elizabeth Warren's of the world, they want us to have no proof reserve. They don't want us to improve ourselves, make the industry more credible and salubrious. So they actually told the public company accounting regulator, the PCOB, to put out a letter denigrating proof reserves. So this is actually why we need legislation that ratifies POR is a real thing and a good thing, basically to stop these kinds of campaigns attacking proof reserves. We need to standardize

it and we need the big accounting firms to get on board. Right now they're scared to because of these pressure campaigns. So that's why we need legislation at the federal level. So for those of you in Congress that are listening, please do that. Well, I guess that's a good dovetail into what happened this week in Congress, but maybe we'll do the quick deal of the week before we do that. Yeah, it appears that there was only one deal this week. I don't know. Slow deal week, huh? What happened?

Our intern who does her newsletter really dropped the ball this week. Yeah, I wonder if there actually was only one deal announced this week. It's possible. There must be others. I mean, come on. Anyway, well, do you want to do the deal? All right, flashbots, a billion dollar evaluation. So flashbots, which is the Ethereum-focused, I guess, what would you call the development firm?

they build the M-A-V stuff. So I don't know, I guess they're a first-of-its-kind type of firm. They raised $60 million in a series B, and it was led by paradigm. So that's it. That's our deal. That's the deal. There's news. Yeah, news here on the House Financial Services Committee.

So we've been talking about two bills that are essential, I think, to the functionality of the crypto market. One is a market structure bill, and the second is a stable coin bill. So the market structure bill is now being called the fit bill. So that's kind of an interesting name. What does that actually stand for? I don't know. I was going to ask you. What does fit stand for?

I don't know. Why couldn't they just call it the crypto market structure bill? Why are they trying to make it difficult here? Is it like financial innovation in the 20th century or something? Am I getting that right? Yes. It's called financial innovation and technology for the 21st century act. So that's a good name, actually.

So I like the fit bill. So we got to get the fit bill passed. So procedurally here, this is a bill that is coming out of the House Financial Services Committee and the House Agriculture Committee. It was voted out of both committees this week. So on Wednesday afternoon, it passed through the House Financial Services Committee, which is led by Chair Patrick McKenry, who's from North Carolina. So it was a vote of 35 to 15, some pretty spirited debates.

You really got to see on full display that Stephen Lynch has not. no idea what he's talking about. And it's unfortunate that he represents the great, the great state of Massachusetts. And so 35 to 15, every Republican voted for it. And some of them did remarkable speeches and really kind of drove home some of the virtues of this bill. But to me, the interesting thing here was that six Democrats went along with it. So you had Jim Himes, who's from Connecticut, Josh Gottheimer from New Jersey, Richie Torres from New York. And Stephen Horsford from Nevada, Wiley Nickel from North Carolina,

and Brittany Peterson from Colorado. So this is six Democrats who went up against Maxine Waters and Stephen Lynch, who, you know, I would say along with Elizabeth Warren are some of the most anti-innovation politicians that we have and who really just deeply don't understand this technology. But those six went up against them,

which is not easy. So we should be giving our support to those six Democrats for sure. And what do they have in common? But they're all, they're young. Young. This is the young caucus. Shout out to the youths. The average age here is something like 46 in this cohort here. So you have, you basically just have this dynamic where the young people get it and some of the older ones don't. I mean, Biden is 80. Maxine Waters is 84. You know, it's, Mitch McConnell had some kind of like mini stroke this week. Yeah.

I mean, Warren's 74. Yeah, I did see the McConnell thing. It's crazy. Feinstein had one this week, too, where she was droning on and on and someone just told her to say, aye, and move on. Yeah. I don't, what I don't understand is who is in favor of us living in a gerontocracy? Like, because clearly that side is winning for some reason. Who supports that?

Is there someone out there that's like, you know what? I just really want my policy makers to be over 80 years old. Those are the people that vote. The older people vote, you know? It's, you just have to have younger people get out there and mobilize. It really is striking that the Democrats that defected here are the youthful ones. It's remarkable. You know that expression signs progresses one funeral at a time.

Kind of getting the same vibes here. Yeah. it's exactly right. So the big thing with this market structure bill, you know, there's a lot of arguments back and forth. There's some Sab 121 talks. So McKenry got involved in that going back and forth with Lynch. Not surprisingly, Stephen Lynch thinks that no bank should be able to touch crypto and that Sab 121 makes sense, which how that makes any sense is beyond me. So Stephen Lynch's actual view, State Street is in his district. His view is that they should not be able to be in the digital asset custody business and that Sab 121 makes sense, which is just crazy. He also has fidelity

in his district. He also has circle in his district. And this guy is anti-blockchain innovation. Just crazy. But so there's some good Sab 121 talk. There's a big bone of contention here on both the market structure bill and the stable coin bill is the state path. So whether or not you should be able to operate stable coins out of state trust licenses. And so that would obviously impact all of the existing stable coin providers as well as, you know, a coin base or fidelity. So it looks like the stable coin bill is getting delayed here. So at the time of this recording, that did not get voted out of committee as far as I can tell. So that has been derailed. It looks like it's being pushed. The markup on that is being pushed till after Labor Day. And what is being said here is that it

was actually the White House that intervened and stalled this out, basically. So there's a bunch of parliamentary procedures, but the Democrats kind of pulled away from the table here. And the argument is that banks, the bank lobby, came in at the last minute, the 11th hour, and said, you should only be able to do a stable coin out of a federally chartered bank. Now, that's obviously in their interest. No surprise the bank lobby doesn't want competition from upstarts like PayPal and other. who have tried to do these stable coins out of state trust licenses. But it seems like the Biden administration just went along with the bank lobby here.

And we'll see what happens to this stable coin bill. But it has not voted out of committee. That's kind of a huge paradox, though, right? Because the Fed's guidance to federally chartered banks is you cannot issue a stable coin on a public blockchain. So would this override that? No, this would just say that you can only do it. It just ensures that banks do not have competition for transactions. I mean, my understanding is that the, you know, kind of established financial regulatory view in this country is banks can't actually issue real stable coins. They can't.

So this is a massive catch 22. It's a contradiction. So you can only, you can't do a stable coin unless you're federally chartered. And if you're federally chartered, you can't do a stable coin. That's basically what the law is going to be. That's the law in this country, which is crazy. But yeah, the banks just don't want, I mean, this is pretty straightforward for the banks. So they want to be able to do custody because they can make a lot of money.

And they would probably do stable coins too if that was permissible. But they just don't want anyone else doing stable coins. And to some degree, you can actually understand it where you're saying, all right, well, if we can't do stable coins, how come Circle can do stable coin? Like, I get that. The banks should be allowed to do stable coins. stable coins, but address that issue and then go compete. On the market structure bill, people were excited that it left committee.

I believe that's the first time a dedicated crypto bill has actually been successfully voted out of committee. Yeah, it's the first time. It's definitely the first time. What procedurally is next? What are the odds here? Well, so now it'll go before the whole house. And so, and then theoretically it would go before the Senate.

But people are saying that this is unlikely to be a standalone bill at the end of the day. This is the type of thing that could theoretically get passed by being attached to another bill. So maybe there would be some legislation that absolutely has to pass towards the end of the year. And if there's consensus on a framework here, maybe this could get attached. That's my understanding of the best path forward. I think either way, the fact that this actually was elevated from the committee, a bipartisan manner is a very strong show of support and generally improves the prospects in Washington, whether or not this specific bill gets passed. Yeah, I agree with that. And it drives home the fact

that it is Congress that should be setting digital asset policy in the United States. It is Congress's job to do that. It is not the SEC's job to do that and to do that via rulemaking and these opaque kind of backroom, uh, manipulative. of rules that prevent banks from holding cryptocurrencies and things like that. It's really the job of Congress to act here. So, yeah, whether or not this makes it into law this cycle, I think it's heading in a favorable direction. And it's also heading in the favorable direction based on some of the young Democrats that are behind this. I would love to see some more Democrats get on board with this. You know, once this goes beyond just this committee, we'll find out if Jake

gotchen class is on board with this. We'll find out some of these other younger, more technologically savvy Congresspeople who are going to be leading the country at some point if they are on board with this from a technology standpoint. So speaking of the SEC, they have settled in enforcement action against Kwan Stamp, the well-known security and audit firm. I'd actually forgotten this, but they did an ICO in 2017, and now KwanSimp has to give the money back. So I bash the SEC all the time on the market structure stuff and going after the good actors,

but this is exactly what the SEC should be doing. This is a good job by the SEC. So the SEC goes out and they, you know, this is a, they tracked down this company that basically did this ICO in 2017. It's a security and audit firm. So you'd hire Kwan Stamp to evaluate like a smart contract, that you want to engage with to make sure that it's secure, that you're not going to be losing

funds in it. Why does this company need a token? So they do this ICO back in 2017 when it was just raining money on all these ICO scammers and they raised what, like $25, $30 million, whatever it was, and they just never launched anything. They never launched, their product has nothing to do with a token. They're just running a normal business and they have this non-dilutive capital. That's an illegal securities offering. So furthermore, like from a customer perspective, would you want to be in business with a company that just has that type of a background and that type of baggage? I mean, it's like, why would you want your security firm to be running like an illegal securities offering? So these are the types of things the SEC needs to clean up.

There's probably a list of 50 other companies that did ICOs that, you know, the SEC could go after them next. It did take them six years to do it. Yeah. Maybe a little faster next time. I know, I know they're busy, but maybe even trying to get ahead of some of this. I don't know. Maybe trying identify scams while they're happening. Well, and to be fair, that wasn't, like, I remember Gensler when he was at MIT was saying, hey, these things are unregistered securities offerings. And I was in total agreement. You remember he spoke at our conference in 2018. And And he was saying a lot of the same stuff. And he was absolutely right.

And the SEC under Clayton at the time should have been more active there. They should have been going after all of these guys that were standing up these ICOs. I mean, just throw up beneath the dress and raise $35 million, non-delutive, never ship the product. It's crazy. All right. So let's roll the bad boys music, I guess, or wait, no. FTCS has different music, crime family music. Okay.

Yeah. Let's roll the, let's roll it. All right. That's actually my favorite musical interlude we do on this show. So SPF has been a bad boy. Yet again. He's again. He's done something wrong again.

So what's he done now? He released, he leaked Caroline Ellison's diaries in an effort to discredit her. He's been kind of witness tampering. Is that fair? That's pretty bad. I mean, that's not just some mean ex-boyfriend type of moves there. That's a straight up witness tampering. It's rude, certainly, very rude.

You can't leak someone's diary. That's private. No, that is, yeah. And how does he have her diary? It was in, so he leaked it via Google Docs, it seems like. So he shared it with a New York Times reporter is the allegation here. And they wrote this. We didn't even put it in our newsletter because it wasn't much to it,

but it was just her personal diaries and how she, was, I don't know, she didn't feel like she was competent enough to lead out. Yeah, she didn't feel up to the job. Stuff like that. So he's clearly trying to discredit her and she'll be the star witness against him. So you can't do that. That's actually illegal. And so they're asking him to be actually incarcerated.

So I think there's a hearing next week on it. So he's been gagged. I don't really know what that means. I mean, I thought his access to the internet was already limited. No, he can go on like coin. He can go on a number of, I think he can probably access his email. Can he listen to OTB? I don't know if you ever, I don't think he's listening to podcasts.

No, I don't think. And they mentioned podcasts. So his favorite game storybook brawl, I think, was shut down, though. Oh, really? So, but maybe he found a new game. So apparently he did a thousand phone calls with journalists, according to the judge. That's crazy. That's a lot.

So the other news. The other news was that, and I wasn't fully aware of this, he's actually financing his legal defense here through his father. And the way his father has the money is that his father got a $10 million gift from FTX. So he's using that $10 million to finance the son's legal defense, which the 10 million was obviously customer money. How is that possible? So this is something that we'd speculated about before, obviously, because it's like, well, where's all the money for the defense? coming from, but now we know it's a fact. They just, they're paying for the lawyers to defend them against the crime with the

proceeds of the crime. How is that allowed? How is that allowed? I looked into it. Apparently that is allowed. That's crazy. Apparently is the thing that happens. When you rob a bank and then immediately hire a lawyer with the money you rob from the bank.

Come on. I watched this documentary on Netflix called Cocaine Cowboys, and they did the same thing. They just had all this money from dealing cocaine, that they just got the best lawyers. That doesn't seem like a should. That seems like a loophole in our legal system. I think we've identified a loophole. So did you also see that the campaign finance charges have been dropped against him? Yeah, that one bothers me because I would have liked to have seen the discovery.

I mean, what were they communicating with these campaigns, were the members of Congress talking back? Was there, you know, so I don't think it's a coincidence of that charge was dropped specifically. So, yeah, I'd need to know more about that because originally they had to break up and not have the trial about that issue because it was in violation of the way he was extradited from the Bahamas.

So when they got him from the Bahamas, the deal with the Bahamians was, hey, we're going to charge him on these things. And then subsequently, they added campaign finance and this China thing, which he was bribing a Chinese, like a CCP official, which I don't even think they knew about that until they got him in the U.S. So there was a determination that they would not, they would be in violation of the extradition treaty if they did this all at once, but they reserved the right to prosecute him in the future. So it's possible, I guess, that they're dropping the charges now and they could reintroduce them at some point in the future. I think that's possible. If this is one of these, like, hey, there's a lot behind the scenes here and it's incriminating to politicians, so we're going to drop it, that would be explosively scandalous.

Yeah, I mean, that's where my head immediately went was, yeah, maybe there's a more benign explanation there. Have you been following this Nigel Farage situation, Matt? Vagely, why don't you tee this up what's happening here? This is like a debanking situation. Yeah, so this isn't a crypto story, but it is, I think it will resonate with crypto people because everyone in this industry was debanked, basically. So this is a scandal that's absolutely consuming British politics right now, which is remarkable that it is. So Nigel Farage, he's a retired politician, right? He was the head of UKIP and he spearheaded the Brexit movement, right?

bit of a firebrand, you know, not generally that well liked in British politics. Last month, he posted a video on Twitter saying his account at Coots, which is a kind of high net worth bank, a subsidier of NatWest, had been terminated. The BBC runs an article, the BBC runs an article saying, yeah, well, actually, it's because his account ran below the threshold. the minimum threshold required to maintain the account, which is actually really questionable because, you know, like the BBC is now at that point sort of releasing his personal financial data, which is pretty odd. As it turns out, the head of Nat West, Dame Allison, she's like

a duchess, I guess, or some kind of the female equivalent of a, of a lord, female version of Lord. She sat next to a BBC journalist at a gala and told him this, which I think that's not allowed. So she sat next to the business editor at a charity dinner the day before this BBC story was published. So people were kind of raised an eyebrow at that. They're like, well, it seems like that's how they found out. Turns out that his account was. not, he wasn't debanked for economic reasons. He was debanked because he was, you know, basically the leadership of the bank disagreed with his politics. And they had a 40-page dossier on him that the bank had compiled, basically with all his mean tweets and stuff like that. And in the

UK, believe it or not, there's actually a law saying that you can't unbank someone for their political views. So I think America's got a lot to learn from this. And this turns out of it. into a gigantic scandal. The BBC apologizes. The head of Nat West, Dame Allison, resigns, the head of Coots resigns. And a number of other bank CEOs were given the hair dryer treatment by the UK PM. So this turned into a huge nationwide scandal over the debanking of one politician. And I'm looking at this wistfully, like, well, hang on a second. So a whole industry was debanked in this country and basically no one cared. Now you have a single person that's debanked in the UK and it's this massive scandal that

embroils the banks and the state press and there's a bunch of people that were fired because of it. This is one of the few times where I've looked at the UK and been really impressed. Yeah. Because they actually kind of, they have their act together over there on this specific matter. It's like you got a new crypto. CEO being debanked every day over here. And it's weird because there's no actual freedom of speech law. So you certainly can be jailed for saying hateful stuff. But there is a law that says

a bank can't cut off your access because they disagree with your political views. So yeah, maybe Congress, like learn a thing or two from this. It would be great if we had a similar fair access rule. Add it to the list after market structure and stable coins. So yeah, I just felt that I had to address this because it's been absolutely mind-boggling watching this go from like Nigel Farage complaining on Twitter to the whole British political establishment is embroiled in scandal over this one thing. Yeah, that's crazy. Did you see that Wyoming is now trying to hire someone to run their stable coin initiative? This person will be paid more than the governor, it turns out. It's 150K, governor makes 140K, but they want someone to come in there and basically be in charge of

that Stablecoin initiative that the state's doing, which I think it's great. That's a marquee job. Yeah, that sounds like a super fun job, actually. Yeah, I wonder where you have to live if you're, I guess you probably have to live in the capital, right? Okay, in other important news this week, Matt, what do you make of the creation of the first room temperature ambient pressure superconductor? Huh. What's that? Does that excite you? Are you enthralled by it? I clicked on a couple tweets and I don't, what is that? First of all, what's a superconductor?

So I don't know what a superconductor is. I feel that they're maybe used in MRI machines or nuclear reactors. I feel that, but I don't know if it's true. So what does a room temperature one of that do? Well, I think superconductors are typically very cold. They have to be cooled. And this one operates in our normal conditions. Oh, great.

So people are very excited by it. And apparently, it can be constructed with ordinary materials in a normal lab. And so if it's true, it's basically one of the biggest material science breakthroughs. the last 100 years. That's awesome. Well, we should put that down in the survival guide, so things that we need to relearn if there's an apocalypse scenario. Have you seen this book?

Is there just one? Well, there's, I don't know. I think it's a pretty famous book. One of our portfolio company founders has this book, and it's basically the book of how to do everything as a human, from make fire to penicillin, all the things that you would need to rebuild society, basically. in the event of something cataclysmic.

And I feel like this room temperature, super whatever, if that's that big of a deal, you got to put a page in there. Here's how you would build a room temperature MRI machine or whatever the hell this thing is. But I feel like if we're building civilization up from scratch, superconductors are, that's like kind of the end of the tech tree.

Oh, yeah. We're more focused on fire and guns. Plumbing. Yeah. We don't need MRI. machines if we're just starting from scratch. MRIs are a luxury. You probably like once you get to evolve to pickleball, you definitely need an MRI machines

because you're going to have just painful injury after painful injury. Well, yeah, look, I have a bone to pick with a sport of pickleball. I mean, there I was laughing at all the headlines saying that it's this cause of a wave of injuries and then it claims me as a victim. So you popped your shoulder out, huh? Yeah, I know. I didn't fall over. Okay, I don't fall over when I'm playing pickleball, but I did swing too hard and my shoulder popped out of its socket.

Oh, okay, but popped right back in, right? Yeah, so I popped it back in. I actually kept playing, to be clear. And then I was like, all right, well, this hurts a lot. So I go to the doctor. He's like, yeah, you dislocated your shoulder. He asked me what I was doing. Playing pickleball.

I was playing pickleball. They said, add them to the list. We're tallying up the list. He said you're not the first. Wow. But I can still podcast. People are saying, well, are you going to be able to do on the brink? Yeah.

Yeah. I did. I am. The show must go on. Yeah, look, I mean, I think my shoulder is fine. I don't know. I don't need surgery. So we're going to go back to P ball soon.

Oh, so you've been out for a while? Yeah. Week. It's been a tough week. All right. Yeah, you got to get back in there. Look, we'll keep you updated on the Superconductor news. Apparently, a number of folks who are trying to replicate it.

Delian from Varda, another Miami stalwart, is apparently in the lab trying to replicate. Someone in the end, the Brink community wants to send me a tweet with just maybe three bullet points on what this thing is and three bullet points on why it matters. That would be great. Well, it means that electricity would no longer be lost to heat dissipation as it moves along power lines. quoting that from a physics article. So no more power cords? What are we talking here? I think power transmission would become much cheaper,

which would make the green energy revolution much easier, for sure, because transmission is a huge problem. Us just sitting here not knowing what this is is probably the equivalent of someone when electricity was built, being like, what's the big deal? You ever heard of a candle? This is like Ben McKenzie talking about crypto. Yeah, it's just a total Muppet who knows nothing what he's talking about.

I would say we know as much about superconductors as he knows about crypto. Yeah, that kind of man. Exit stage left. So Kathleen Brightman had a funny article in Fortune just excoriating him. I need to put that in the newsletter. Yeah, that was really good. Kathleen is a very good writer. She is a humorist.

Yeah. Ben McKenzie. No one watched your show anyway, pal. I actually did watch it I watched it the O.C. Yeah, I don't know why I was young Never saw it was forced to

I think that's it for the week It's about to be the weather alerts are going off Up here in Boston right now They're saying that this is going to be the worst storm in years This afternoon And you told me that you plan on taking a ferry During the worst storm in years I'm starting to rethink that

based on what I'm seeing right now. This could be your final dispatch, frankly. It could be. Yeah, well, fingers crossed. Well, I can't do the show on my own, so you have to make it. I can't just monologue for an hour. I bet you could monologue for an hour. You could just read the HR or whatever that bill is and just read that.

That would be a good episode. You know how Pomp does those episodes? Pomp used to do those episodes where he would just like read something. This reads. I can do that. And LW does it. It's actually pretty good. You've been on that a few times.

I think I would do classic works of literature. Just sit there and read them. I mean, yeah, that could be interesting. I think people would listen to that. I would do children's books. Yeah. Get through a lot of them. Yeah, we good.

All right, everyone. That's it for the week. Have a safe and healthy weekend. We will see you on Monday.