Tangle - The FTX collapse, explained.

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

We're going long on Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, the complicated story of a Democratic mega donor and cryptocurrency exchange going belly up. Plus, a reader question about the alleged "15,000" Iranians being sentenced to death, a preview of tomorrow, and a chance to advertise in Tangle.Follow this link to advertise with Tangle!See Tangle's instagram post, among the first to debunk the "15,000 protesters executed in Iran" viral article, here.You can read today's podcast here, today’s “Under the Radar” story here, and today’s “Have a nice day” story here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum. Some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be stepping into a world we haven't really touched on a ton in Tangle. We're going to be talking about FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, who I think many of you have probably heard about.

We got a lot of requests to cover this story, and I'm excited to dive in. Before we do, though, I want to make two notes. First of all, we are looking for some advertisers heading into 2023. If you listen to this podcast or you read the free version of our newsletters, you've probably encountered some ads. We used to not run advertisements in the newsletter, but we started doing it recently. And I explained in my announcement about that why we're doing that, which is we want to create a more diverse revenue stream than just subscriptions and donations. Because when you are insulated from financial stress,

like what's happening in the country right now, you are better prepared to stay independent and stay committed, at least in our case, to our goal of doing independent, non-sensationalist political news that's turning the temperature down on things. When you're not strapped for cash, you don't need to change your plans in order to make more money. We also want to hire some people, which is obviously very expensive and having more money would be helpful with that. But when I launched ads, one of the things I said was I would really love if we could get advertisers, inbound advertisers, from people in the Tangle network, which is you, people who listen to this podcast or read the newsletter. So if you are interested in reaching our audience,

which is obviously growing and quite big and very loyal and engaged, fill out the form. That's in the link in the episode description. It's sort of an inbound form that'll go to my team, not me, because I'm keeping my hands out of the advertising stuff or shoot someone an email you can write to magdalena that's magdalena m-a-g-d-a-l-e-n-a at readtangle.com who's helping run our ad stuff and get the conversation going because i would love to use some advertisers both here in the podcast and in the newsletter who are in that Tangle network. Also, I want to give a quick preview that tomorrow we are doing a midterm post-mortem in our Friday edition, which is subscribers only. So if you're curious about how Democrats pulled off what they pulled off or why Republicans seem to

have underperformed, we're going to explore the six or seven big theories out there and kind of flesh out the evidence for them. And I'm going to talk a little bit about what I think happened and what I think drove the midterm results we got. But it is a subscriber's only edition, which means you have to be a Tangle member, which means you need to go to readtangle.com slash membership to get the newsletter in your inbox.

All right, with that out of the way, we're going to jump in with our quick hits. First up, yesterday, Republicans won their 218th seat in the House of Representatives, assuring them a majority for the next two years. Six races in the House still remain uncalled. next two years. Six races in the House still remain uncalled. Number two, the Senate advanced the Respect for Marriage Act, a bill that would enshrine protections for same-sex marriage into law, all but assuring it becomes law later this year. Number three, Senate Republicans re-elected Mitch McConnell to be minority leader. The seven-term Kentucky senator fended off a group of conservatives who had come together to challenge him by supporting Senator Rick Scott, the Republican from Florida, for the position.

Number four, U.S. Representative Karen Bass, the Democrat, defeated Rick Caruso, the Republican, in the closely watched Los Angeles mayoral race. Number five, NATO agreed with an assessment from Polish officials that a strike in Poland was the result of an accident, saying an errant Ukrainian defense system missile landed in Polish territory. Number six, 25 Los Angeles County sheriff's recruits were struck by a driver, quote, going the wrong way, end quote, in an SUV. That's according to some reports on the ground. Five people were critically injured and the accident is being investigated. It's been roughly a week since the crypto market began tanking. It took just days for the crypto exchange FTX to go from a $32 billion business to bankruptcy. Today, the crypto sell-off takes a pause. BlockFi reportedly prepares to lay off workers and declare bankruptcy.

Advisors overseeing what's left of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried's empire are struggling to find missing funds. They cite poor internal controls and record keeping. I mean, this was not... Founder Sam Bankman-Fried went from industry captain to black sheep and... Over the last few days, dozens of emails have come into Tangle requesting that we cover this story. It has a lot of elements, finance, politics, Ukraine, cryptocurrency, and more. We've waited to cover it because honestly, there was not much clarity early on about what exactly happened, but a picture now is starting to emerge. Today,

we're going to try to do the basics, explain exactly what happened, why it matters to you, why it's relevant to a politics newsletter, and what people are saying about it. So first, we'll start with what happened. On Friday, FTX, the company's full name is an abbreviation for Futures Exchange, the third largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world filed for bankruptcy. A crypto exchange is a place where people can trade digital currencies or crypto for other assets like conventional money. The company filed for bankruptcy after experiencing the crypto version of a bank run, an event that happens when fears that a bank may cease to exist cause so many customers to try to withdraw their funds

simultaneously that the bank can't dole out all the cash. Bankman Freed, who is a democratic mega-donor and was recently estimated to be worth $23 billion, stepped down as CEO. His net worth has all but evaporated and an estimated 1 million FTX customers are now having trouble withdrawing their cash. So why does this matter? Well, for starters, cryptocurrency is an emerging space that politicians already had their eyes on, and the circumstances of FTX's downfall have prompted lawmakers and lobbyists to call for more regulation and oversight. FTX wasn't just short liquid assets to cover its liabilities, it also appears to have created

a web of other cryptocurrencies to inflate just how much coverage it really had. Fears about similar exchanges crumbling sent the crypto market falling $150 billion in value just last week alone. FTX was also not just limited to the crypto space. FTX and Sam Bankman Freed, also referred to as SBF, have cast a huge net. Through FTX and other companies, SBF has significant investments and stake in many companies across the crypto space. He was the second largest democratic donor in the world behind only George Soros. He donated nearly $38 million in this midterm cycle, and he also helped run a website to allow people to donate cryptocurrency to Ukraine.

It had investments in major sports brands too, including MLB, NBA, and Formula One. To give you an idea of just how wide of a net this financing casts, consider this, which I will also note doubles as a journalistic disclosure. FTX and SPF are investors in Semaphore, a newly launched media startup run by former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief and New York Times columnist Ben Smith. Semaphore inquired about acquiring or partnering with Tangle, and I actually met with Smith to discuss the idea, but no deal came to fruition. So even I was briefly grazed by the cash that Bankman-Fried and FTX were moving around. Now, Bankman-Fried and FTX are being investigated by the cash that Bankman-Fried and FTX were moving around. Now, Bankman-Fried and FTX are

being investigated by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to determine if any criminal offenses were committed, according to the Associated Press. The story around this is incredibly complex, but generally speaking, it goes something like this. Bankman-Fried created FTX, a place where people can buy and sell crypto in exchange for other assets. He launched FTX with the profits he made from running a crypto hedge fund called Alameda Research, which built its fortunes buying crypto in one exchange and selling them at a higher price in others. However, the two companies were supposed to be operating separately. Two weeks ago, Coindesk, a website that reports on the crypto space, dropped an article detailing the seemingly close ties between FTX and Alameda Research.

Alameda's balance sheet consisted largely of tokens created by FTX. That realization caused a massive sell-off in those tokens over customer fears that something was amiss. Subsequent reporting paints an even more troubling picture. It appears that when customers were buying and selling cryptocurrency on FTX, the company was preserving the value of their customers' money with liability assets that it was mostly inventing, namely other cryptocurrencies, which were being propped up in a cycle of convincing people the currencies were worth more than they were, inflating their market caps, and covering up the fact that FTX had very little actual liquid

cash to support its customers, which obviously is a very bad thing, especially if a crypto bank run happens. One popular theory explained neatly by Matt Levine, whose coverage of this in Bloomberg has been essential, is that Bankman-Fried was passing money from FTX to Alameda, who then lost the money. Or that Alameda lost the money when crypto markets melted down earlier this year, and Bankman-Fried floated Alameda with FTX customers' cash, and then Alameda failed to make the money back. Either way, the same assets were appearing in both Alameda and FTX's balance sheets, and Reuters reported that Bankman-Fried was secretly using $10 billion of customer funds to prop up his

trading business. What we also know, for now, is that about $16 billion of customer cash went into FTX and nobody seems to know exactly where all that money is. Reuters reported that Bankman-Fried transferred $10 billion of customer cash from FTX to Alameda and a large portion has since disappeared. On Twitter, Bankman-Fried is now shopping around FTX's balance sheet in hopes of finding an investor to make his customers whole. In the crypto and finance space, the story is having a massive impact because of its effect on confidence in cryptocurrency. In politics, it has people talking about how Democrats will replace one of their biggest donors and how Congress should be regulating the industry.

In the philanthropy space, it's a bombshell. Bankman Freed has promised to give away much of his massive wealth and had donated to countless non-profits or assured them money was coming. Today, we're going to take a look at some reactions from the right and the left and then my take, given that our specialty is politics, we'll focus on the political threads of this story. So first up, we'll start with what the right is saying. Many say it's another warning sign about the speculative nature of cryptocurrencies, but they are skeptical of government regulation. Some call out Democrats and the media who had taken SBF as money and framed him as a rich do-gooder. Others say there are a lot of questions remaining about Democrats' ties to SBF. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it another lesson in the risk of joining mania in speculative assets.

According to a journal report, FTX lent more than half of its customer assets to Alameda to fund risky bets. Uh-oh. Mr. Bankman-Fried says FTX now faces a shortfall of up to $8 billion. If it can't raise that cash, the plunge could be swift and the losses for investors steep, if not total. That's capitalism, or at least a speculative form of it. Regulators will have to watch for contagion to the banking system, but there's no reason not to let FTX fail if it comes to that. The last thing we need is the Fed's rescuing investors in speculative assets, the board said. All of this is a lesson for crypto investors and the Fed, which encourage excessive risk-taking by keeping real interest rates below zero for so long. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler has

raised fair concerns about crypto company conflicts of interest and opaque profit-making activities such as those that seem to have landed FTX in trouble, the board said. But his regulation by enforcement isn't working and merely fuels market uncertainty. Mr. Bankman-Fried and other crypto leaders have lobbied Congress to enact clear rules. Members of Congress disagree over which regulator is best suited to supervise crypto firms, but this can be worked out. The bigger problem is that progressives favor letting Mr. Gensler regulate the industry out of business. One worries that an FTX collapse will become an excuse for him to do so. In the New York Post, Miranda Devine criticized the money made from nothing that arrived for

Democrats at just the right time. It's a stunning fall to earth, Devine said. The financial media and big investors have feeded the young billionaire as a saint who shunned earthly pleasures like Lamborghinis and Rolexes, but lived only to give away all his money and make the world a better place. He was the most famous millennial adherent to a cult known as effective altruism, which originated at Oxford University, found fertile ground in Silicon Valley, and now has gone down in flames along with him. EA is a disguised form of socialism, because all the good that is done just happens to match up perfectly with the left's obsessions, whether climate change, social justice, equity, banning meat, or his favorite, pandemic preparedness.

SPF certainly impacted the midterms, funneling his millions into the Democratic National Committee and Democrat-friendly PACs such as Protect Our Future and Guarding Against Pandemics. He donated to committees aligned with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to help Democrats win races, He donated to committees aligned with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to help Democrats win races, she said. He lavished his large essay on pro-crypto Democrats like New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who was sponsoring a bill to lock the Securities and Exchange Commission out of regulating the crypto market. He also visited the White House, meeting with top Biden advisors Steve Ricchetti on April 22nd and May 12th, according to the Washington Free Beacon. No wonder the Biden administration has been weak on regulating the crypto market.

It was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the media massaged his profile. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. In the Epoch Times, Jeffrey Tucker described it as something akin to a democratic money laundering scheme. Where to begin, Tucker asked. There is the strange relationship that FTX had with the

Ukrainian government, which used the exchange as a depository of funds. This was well enough known that Bankman Freed bragged about it. Then FTX became a huge donor to the Democratic National Committee. Fascinating. Very convenient. This Ukrainian FTX-DNC relationship would normally be all over the headlines as worthy of a deep look, especially with the midterm timing, the wild passion of the Biden administration to funnel as much money as it could to Ukraine at a time when Americans are suffering from high inflation, and the murky world of crypto financing that bypasses normal banking channels. There are other strange signs, such as how FTX was founded just following the announcement in 2019

that Biden would run for president and that Bankman-Fried's own mother was a co-founder of Mind the Gap PAC, the sole purpose of which has been to fund Democrat campaigns, Tucker said. Additionally, there's Alameda Research, which served as the investment arm and eventual destination of billions in customer funds from FTX, a practice that violated every best practice of the crypto world, which favors 100% reserves. It's all just incredibly shocking. The ties, the trickery, the scamming, the dark money, the ruling class ties, the fake organizations, the ridiculous celebrations of who, in retrospect, is an obvious fraud, along with the silly children the fake man had tapped to pretend to be the C-suite of FTX's sister company. What a symbol of our times.

Alright, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left is saying. Many liberals are disappointed in the news because they had high hopes for SBF's philanthropy. Others argue that this is the latest example of why we need regulation in the space. Some express deep disappointment in SBF showing his true colors. Matty Iglesias wrote about how much hope he had in SBF and how bad the situation now looks. Bankman Freed's publicly stated plan was reckless, but the truth appears to be much worse than reckless, even as it's still not fully clear exactly how much worse. Did he and his circle lose the money? Did they pocket it? And for those of us who defended him

against some of his critics, a reckoning is due. SBF is notable in politics because he gave a lot of money. He's notable to me in particular because he gave to causes that I think are good, Iglesias said. He gave tens of millions of dollars to get Donald Trump out of the White House and also quite a bit to Democrats in the 2022 cycle. Any political success is a highly collective endeavor and no one person is responsible for any result. But money does matter in politics, and some of these races, including very notably the 2020 Electoral College, were very close. It's plausible that without SBF's money, Trump would still be in the White House, Iglesias said. By betraying his clients, I don't know whether he defrauded or whatever else in a legal sense, but he certainly betrayed them, SBF is leaving many of his causes worse off than they would have been if he'd never invested in them. He's also brought

negative brand energy to the whole concept of effective altruism, including the people working in areas he didn't spend as much of his money on, like farm animal welfare and public health in poor countries. In the new republic, Alex Shepard said he hopes this is a wake-up call for Democrats. It's easy to imagine a world in which Sam Bankman Freed treated this moment as a coronation, arriving as a new political power player who would use his vast wealth and influence for decades. Instead, as Democrats piled up victories in tight congressional races, Bankman Freed was holed up in the Bahamas as his cryptocurrency exchange collapsed amid a liquidity crisis

and allegations that he had misused funds, Shepard said. Democratic hopes in Bankman-Fried had already started evaporating before the elections. Although he spent big in the primaries, the spigot dried up down the stretch, possibly due to FTX's worsening situation. By mid-October, he had backtracked on his $1 billion pledge, calling it dumb, and paused campaign spending altogether. There's a lesson there for Democrats. Get out of bed with crypto bros like Bankman Freed and regulate the industry, Shepard said. For most of the last few years, the party has been divided on the rise of cryptocurrency, which is decentralized, unregulated digital currency. unregulated digital currency. Senator Elizabeth Warren in particular has pushed for more regulation,

citing its potential for risk, fraud, and chaos, as well as its extreme environmental impact and the high energy required to mine digital coins. Others in the party, meanwhile, have insisted that Democrats should proceed more gingerly. Bankman-Fried was initially connected with many Democrats via campaign contribution. But Democrats have an opportunity not just to act, but to unite on cryptocurrency regulations now, to stop taking money from the Bankman-Frieds of the world, and to start pushing for badly needed regulations. In Vox, Kelsey Piper recapped an interview she had with him this week via Twitter DM, and expressed dismay at the positions he took. As we message, I was trying to make sense of what, behind the PR and charitable donations and the lobbying, Bankman-Fried actually believes about what's right and what's wrong,

and especially the ethics of what he did and the industry he worked in, she said. Looming over our whole conversation was the fact that people who trusted him have lost their savings and that he's done incalculable damage to everything he proclaimed only a few weeks ago to care about. The grief and pain he has caused is immense, and I came away from our conversation appalled by much of what he said. But if these mistakes had haunted him, he largely didn't show it. Before his empire collapsed, Bankman-Fried was actively engaged in lobbying in Washington for a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency, she wrote. But in our conversation, he dismissed their role. He characterized his past conciliatory statements,

like when he said just last month that some amount of crypto regulation would definitely be good, as little more than PR. In doing so, he all but confirmed the view of critics who have argued that his overtures to Washington were much more about image than substance. Bankman-Fried has maintained that FTX has never invested the deposits of crypto account holders on the exchange. I pressed him on that point via Twitter, and while he continued to insist that FTX did not directly use account money in this way, he said that Alameda, which he also owns, had borrowed far more money from FTX's balance sheet for investments than he had realized. Alright, that is it for the right and the left are saying, which brings us to my take.

First of all, I'm glad to be just an observer in this mess and not directly involved. One of the fears I've always had about taking investment money in Tangle or being owned by someone is that a situation like this could arise. Every mission-oriented organization has to make calculations about whose money to take and why. And I feel bad for the many good people who have or were planning to rely on SBF's money for a genuine cause they believed in, only to have the rug ripped out from under them. By all indications, SBF was an interesting and decent dude. I followed him regularly. He was mega rich, obviously, but also unique in the space and particularly good at selling a vision for a better future, one where mega rich people like him were honest about their intentions and cynicism. His attitude seemed to be, get rich to spend on things you think are good.

And I'm okay with that and appreciate the transparency. That is the essence of the whole effective altruism movement. It's okay to do some bad things from the effective altruist perspective, like engage in the depravity of capitalism, to do some good things, in SBF's case, invest in a bunch of liberal causes. What we're getting instead is another lesson in how smart people with seemingly good intentions can do very shady, very bad things in an effort to win. Perhaps now that we're seeing the real side of SBF, the truth is that he wasn't that smart or that good after all, which is a bummer because in the macro, his actions are going to hurt an industry like cryptocurrency that does have a lot of potential. I'm a believer in the

technology behind crypto and the potential for it. I own cryptocurrency that I bought years ago when it was just a moonshot idea and I watched the value of it grow and grow and grow and then collapse and then grow and then collapse and now collapse again. While making a few thousand dollars as a broke journalist was great, it was never really the point. The idea was that a blockchain, the decentralized ledger propping up cryptocurrency transactions, was an opportunity to bring transparency and level the power dynamics in spaces that have traditionally been rife with fraud and scams. Many of us who read enthusiastically about the space imagined a future where we relied on it for bank transactions and payments and plenty more. Now, though, SBF has helped define that same space as one rife with fraud and scams, too.

It's hard to overstate how much long-term damage his actions may do. However you feel about his politics, he was truly supposed to be one of the quote-unquote good guys. Without question, moments like this make me glad for regulators. As much as I sometimes loathe the government, its intrusiveness, and inefficiency, the fact that the SEC and Justice Department are already investigating brings some comfort, some hope at least, that the people who lost their shirts might be able to be made whole, and that if what SBF did is as bad as it looks, he will pay a sufficient price for his potential crimes. As for the politics of it all, some of the stories are bogus and some are deeply concerning. The whole Democrats funneled money through Ukraine and FTX

story seems to be mostly bogus. FTX allowed Ukrainian charitable funds to be delivered in crypto and then turn those funds into normal currency. There's no evidence Ukraine was rerouting any of that money to Democrats. It also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. SBF was proudly and publicly dumping tens of millions of dollars money to Democrats. It also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. SBF was proudly and publicly dumping tens of millions of dollars into Democratic candidates. He didn't need a money laundering scheme to pass through Ukraine. Meanwhile, we can see how the money sent to Ukraine using FTX has been spent. More concerning, obviously, is just what this illustrates about how our government works right now. SBF gives cash to Democrats. Then SBF lobbies Democrats

for certain regulatory rules to be passed in Congress. Democrats enthusiastically prop him up. Then SBF openly admits his belief in regulation was a complete public relations scam, all while it turns out his entire financial enterprise is being held up by sleight of hand. Some Democrats touting his ideas either took the story hook, line, and sinker or knew he was full of hot air and ran with him anyway. Neither outcome is a good look. In the meantime, all I can hope is that some of the people who got ripped off can get their cash back, but I wouldn't hold your breath. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one is from Carly in Morrisville, Pennsylvania.

What's up, Morrisville? She said, I saw several social media posts, including one from Viola Davis, attributing a Newsweek article that says 15,000 Iranian protesters were sentenced to death for protesting Masa Amini in Iran. Is this true or is this the internet being the internet? I saw this too and yeah, it's basically nonsense. Our Instagram account actually was one of the first to debunk this story, so if you want to check that out, there's a link in the episode description. But the initial report was posted by Newsweek and it was so widely circulated that even

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a man who has an entire intelligence apparatus at his fingertips, actually shared it. Here's what is real. Thousands of protesters in Iran have been arrested. A handful, maybe five or so, have been sentenced to death already. The 15,000 figure is a rough estimate of just how many people have been arrested. Sources reporting that figure have also said 350 have died in various ways throughout the protests. With 15,000 people arrested, members of Iran's parliament signed a statement saying the people waging a war against God should be dealt with, quote, decisively. This was interpreted as parliament planning to execute

all 15,000 people, but after the report went viral, many members made it clear that is not what they meant. And for what it's worth, these mistakes are much more common when U.S. journalists are covering shocking reports about nations that are adversaries of the U.S. I encourage you to always view them with skepticism. Adam Johnson calls this the North Korea rule of journalism. Regardless, none of this should be comforting. So far, we know of five people that are likely going to be executed for a righteous protest against a regime that stifles free speech and the free movement of its people. It's certainly possible dozens or even hundreds more face the same fate. 15,000 reportedly have been arrested. It's okay to be irate and deeply

concerned about what's happening in Iran, but there's no need for the invention of even more horror. Alright, that is it for our reader question section, which brings us to our under the radar section. A bill that will limit the use of non-disclosure agreements, or NDA agreements, in sexual harassment cases is heading to President Biden's desk. agreements and sexual harassment cases is heading to President Biden's desk. The U.S. House passed the Speak Out Act with bipartisan support on Wednesday with a 315 to 109 vote. It passed the United States Senate unanimously. The bill only applies to NDAs that are signed before a dispute arises, the kind of agreement you sign on your first day of work. Axios has the story about what the bill will do, and there's a link to it in today's episode description.

All right, next up is our numbers section. These are all numbers that came from our survey yesterday. 2,901 is the total number of Tangle readers who filled out yesterday's survey. 24% is the percentage of all readers who said they voted for Donald Trump in 2016. 5% is the percentage of all readers who said they'd consider voting for Donald Trump in 2024. 4.3% is the percentage of Tangle readers who identified as Democrats and said they definitely want Biden to run again in 2024. 100 is the rough estimate of Tangle readers who replied to yesterday's email to tell me they had voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020.

3 is the number I counted so far who said they were likely or definitely going to be voting for Trump again in 2024. 17% is the percentage of Tangle readers who said that in the event of a Biden vs Trump 2024 race, they would either not vote or would vote for someone else. Alright, last but not least, our have a nice day section. An underwater buoy could be the future of energy. A Scottish startup called AWS Ocean is testing the wave swing, a contraption that harnesses the power of waves to turn them into energy.

The 50-ton buoy-like device is tethered to the ocean floor and uses the force of passing waves to generate power. After six months at sea, it peaked at producing 80 kilowatts. For context, about 10 kilowatts is enough to power an average home of a family of four. That was 20% better than expected. The International Renewable Energy Agency says there is enough energy in the motion of the ocean to power the entire earth. New Atlas has the story and there is a link to it in today's episode description. All right, everybody, that is it for today's podcast. As always, if you want to support our work, please go to readtangle.com slash membership and become a supporter.

Or you can just send this podcast to friends. Tell them to sign up, give us a follow, give us a five-star rating, all that good stuff. Remember, if you want to get tomorrow's newsletter, you have to become a subscriber. And if not, we'll be right back here on Monday. Have a good one. Peace.

Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Sean Brady, and Bailey Saul. Shout out to our interns, Audrey Moorhead and Watkins Kelly, and our social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who designed our logo. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our website at www.readtangle.com. We'll see you next time. story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history,

and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.