Jack Shine

Something Brewing

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The Milwaukee Brewers have sent the two-time defending World Series Champion Los Angeles Dodgers home for what may be a long winter after completing a four-game sweep in the NLCS last night in Dodger Stadium.

The Brewers now advance to their first World Series appearance in 44 years, their 1982 showing being the only one in their history. They have never won a World Series title.

The Brewers returned the favor as the Dodgers swept Milwaukee 4-0 in the 2025 NLCS. A series in which Shohei Ohtani displayed superhuman abilities on the mound and in the batter’s box. He pitched six scoreless innings in the clinching Game 4, allowing two hits and striking out 10, and went 5-for-14 at the plate in the series with three home runs and four RBIs — all three of those homers coming in that same Game 4, where he went 3-for-3. As otherworldly as that version of Ohtani was last fall, he was every bit as human in the rematch this year. Ohtani did finally bust out of a months-long home run slump with a three-run blast in the second inning. The typically demure Ohtani flipped his bat after cracking the homer, looked back toward his dugout and let out a cathartic release of emotion. Dealing with a knee injury had hampered his power and hitting ability, but he finally found his stroke. It appeared to be enough to get the Dodgers to the next game. But the Brew Crew fought all the way back. Jake Bauers cut the lead in half with a two-run double in the fourth. In the fifth, David Hamilton singled home a run and Bauers drew a bases-loaded walk to tie it. Garrett Mitchell led off the sixth with a solo shot off Tanner Scott to give Milwaukee its first lead of the night, and Hamilton tacked on an insurance homer off Edwin Díaz in the ninth.

The NLCS rematch sweep brings to mind a sports psychology concept that doesn’t make the stat sheet. When teams have been beaten, and often in heartbreaking or humiliating fashion, they seem to do quite well when given an opportunity for revenge in future years.

A few examples of this that come to mind beyond the 2025 & 2026 NLCS between Dodgers and Brewers are the National Championship games between Clemson and Alabama, the 2015 season ended with Bama slipping by Clemson, the next season saw Clemson return the favor with Deshaun Watson throwing a late touchdown to seal it for the Tigers.

The Philadelphia Eagles lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in the 2022 season’s Super Bowl, and then got their rematch two years later and absolutely decimated the Chiefs in that game, 40-22. It can happen when a team loses badly in a championship opportunity, as the Denver Broncos were lampooned by the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XLVIII, the only “cold weather” Super Bowl, having been played at MetLife Stadium. The game opened with the snap going past Peyton Manning’s head and into the end zone for a safety, things continued to go downhill from there, with the Seahawks running out to a 43-8 victory. Just a few years later, the Broncos were back in the Super Bowl, again with Peyton under center, and were underdogs against Cam Newton’s Panthers. They played like a team that knew the bitter taste of defeat and would do anything to avoid partaking in it once more, and snatched a 24-10 victory in Super Bowl 50 over Carolina.

Is there precedent for this to occur generationally? As the Seahawks and Patriots rematched 11 years after the famous Malcolm Butler goal line interception that snagged Tom Brady his fourth ring. Can this really play a factor that many years later when both rosters are completely turned over? Well, the Seahawks demolished the Patriots in this past February’s Super Bowl, perhaps it was the matchup, and maybe the organization had the mental edge after what had transpired more than a decade ago.

Sports psychology sidebar aside, the Brewers victory last night does something truly incredible, it leaves three teams in contention for the World Series, all of which are in the bottom half of the league in terms of payroll. Milwaukee ranks 19th, Tampa Bay 25th, and Cleveland dead last.

Commissioner Rob Manfred has dug his heels in for an impending labor fight this offseason that looks as contentious as any since the 1994 dispute cost the MLB a World Series. The majority of owners are determined to implement a cap and floor system. Their latest proposals have set those numbers at a $245.3 million cap and a $171.2 million floor. The MLB Players Association, their union, is staunchly opposed to this.

Thus far in the public negotiation posturing, neither side is speaking the same language, and a long, protracted work stoppage that costs the league significant games in the 2027 season appears inevitable.

Were the Dodgers to accomplish a threepeat this fall, the league would have a lopsided outcome to champion to their fans as proof positive that the current system is broken, and they must carry this fight through whatever collateral damage it brings with it to save the game.

Instead, we are going to get a World Series offering of Milwaukee and either Cleveland or Tampa Bay. Two franchises who have never won a World Series, and Cleveland who is in the league’s longest drought for a team who has lifted the trophy, the dry spell going all the way back to 1948.

Now sure, there are plenty of fans who regardless of the outcome of this World Series desperately want a salary cap and floor in place to allow small market teams to compete for titles on a more consistent and equitable basis, the way the NFL and NBA have allowed, should they acquire the right roster and coaching composition to do so.

I kind of like the idea that New York’s 11% top income tax rate and the rising cost of living within the city would make it even harder for the Yankees to put an end to their now franchise-record-tying 17-year World Series drought with a hard cap in place. But let’s not make this about what I want.

What I want to do is call MLB’s bluff.

Major League Baseball wants a salary cap, to increase competition, and to increase the franchise valuations of the small market clubs. But they have had their eyes on something else, and it directly conflicts with the salary cap push.

Rob Manfred has aligned the MLB media rights to end after the 2028 season. The MLB just watched the NBA sign new television/broadcast rights deals to the tune of $76 billion over 11 years. With Amazon Prime, ESPN, and NBC getting a slice of the pie at roughly 2.6 times the annual value of the last round of rights.

Manfred just had to maneuver media rights restructuring when ESPN dropped Sunday Night Baseball and their $550m a year annual obligation to it, he found a short term home for Sunday Night Baseball on NBC/Peacock, which included coverage of the wild card round, and then prevented losing the $550m a year from ESPN by handing them over the rights to MLB.TV, their out-of-market games package that is the best deal in sports streaming.

How does this tie into the labor fight?

MLB is looking to get a significant increase in media rights in 2029, but there’s a catch. If 60 or more games are lost in a season, the MLB would be paid their normal amount that year from their rights holders, but the contract would extend by a year, and the MLB would owe a discounted season of baseball to their rights holders for that extended year (essentially a free one if the whole season is wiped out).

“The networks might be pleased they’re receiving an extra year at a bargain rate.” — The Athletic

The lockout and the loss of games is MLB’s primary weapon to force the MLBPA to come to the table and negotiate, and accept aspects of their floor and cap system. Yet the MLBPA is aware of this 60 game clause. The players only need to survive two months without income, and the league will be scrambling to get them back on the field in order to fulfill their media rights obligations, and move toward the big money offers for 2029.

If I was Bruce Meyer, executive director of the MLBPA, I wouldn’t pick up the phone for Manfred until May 15th. He’ll be bending on his terms by then, I’d let him talk about their concessions.

Then I’d hang up and tell him to call back when he has a more serious offer.

We may lose a couple months’ worth of baseball next spring, but I can’t fathom how the league sees getting to the media rights negotiating table a year later and a year of current revenue shorter.

It would make sense for them to push for a new CBA that ends after the new media rights deals have been negotiated. Saving the cap fight for another day.

The new media rights may break the current model up and have games broken up across multiple streaming services, but allow for far more national exposure of the sport on a daily basis. This could bring in significantly more revenue that allows the league to make the idea of a cap and floor system even more palatable to the players, as it’s giving them a cut of a much larger pie.

My prediction, it will be a long ugly winter, but the boys will be playing ball by June.

Photo: Governor Tom Wolf / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0

Yuckey Way

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The Boston Red Sox have been eliminated from postseason play after a humiliating two-game sweep at the hands of the New York Yankees. The Yankees took Game 1 by a score of 9-0 and Game 2 by 9-2. That’s an 18-2 aggregate, the most lopsided Wild Card Series since the current format arrived in 2022.

The Red Sox never had any momentum, beginning the series with 14 straight scoreless innings across the two games.

This Red Sox season never really felt right, and even during their incredible 32-5 run that saw them vault from the depths of the AL East to snatching a Wild Card spot, I was always waiting for the regression back to the mean.

It turns out the summer sizzle was in fact a dead cat bounce, as the Sox limped their way through a 12-12 September before getting bounced by their arch nemesis.

Interestingly enough, they never actually played any October baseball this year, with yesterday’s elimination game occurring on the 30th of September.

Let’s take a look at my mid season analysis of the team heading into the trade deadline:

The impact of the expanded postseason on the trade deadline can’t be understated. It is one of several factors that has rewritten how the midsummer major league musical chairs play out. With two additional Wild Card spots, significantly more teams are in contention this time of year than would have been before. My old friends, the Boston Red Sox, who have had a disastrous year by all accounts and expectations, sit just 2.5 games back from the third Wild Card spot. They sit at 43-48 today, a better record than the vibes and the Boston media coverage would indicate.

While they have found some momentum lately, including a recent sweep of the Yankees, they have no business considering themselves buyers at this deadline. But the slim possibility of a returning Crochet and Anthony, along with Craig Breslow’s desperation to save his general manager job, could have them thinking twice at the deadline three weeks from now.

The Red Sox need to sell; starting with Sonny Gray, Aroldis Chapman, and Jarren Duran. Restocking the cupboard that has borne less fruit than expected with the triumvirate of Roman Anthony, Marcelo Mayer, and Kristian Campbell — from varying degrees of disappointment to disaster — should be the priority. The faltering young core has them much further away from a championship window than it appeared just four months ago.

Breslow is also proof positive of the harm playing fast and loose at the trade deadline can do to a team. He gave up James Tibbs for two months of the herbivore Dustin May, and then, this past offseason, sent Kyle Harrison — one of the top left-handed pitching prospects in baseball, owner of a 2.82 ERA that has swelled a bit after a few recent rough starts, and the headline piece coming back in the Devers deal — to Milwaukee for Caleb “What is baseball?” Durbin. I think Caleb knows what baseball is, but he doesn’t often play like it.

To be fair, when the Caleb Durbin trade was made, I didn’t hate it. In hindsight, giving up such a young and capable arm in Kyle Harrison was a mistake, but the intention in getting younger and cheaper at third with a competent piece like Durbin after losing Bregman to Chicago made sense.

Now, John Henry’s unwillingness to kick in an extra $10m over 5 years to Bregman cost them both the veteran right-handed hitter, as well as Harrison, who went 11-5 with a 4.20 ERA across 110-plus innings for the Brewers this season.

That’s a far greater cost than they realized they would be paying, and an argument for cheaping out when you’re the third-most valuable franchise in baseball not being a winning strategy.

They probably did just good enough for Breslow to keep his job, and for John Henry to keep trying to poor-boy this team back into contention.

Talk about losing the battle, but (also) losing the war.

Photo: Bernard Gagnon / Wikimedia Commons — CC BY-SA 3.0

Outta Here

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Famous San Francisco Giants broadcasting duo has called their last game. Mike Krukow is stepping down after 37 years in the broadcast booth.

As we head into the baseball postseason, with an interesting slate of wild card series set to begin on Tuesday, it’s a good time to take a minute to say goodbye to one of baseball’s most iconic announcing teams.

Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper called Giants games together for 36 seasons. Kruk went public with his inclusion body myositis diagnosis in 2014, stopped traveling east of Denver by 2017, and eventually came off the road entirely — calling road games from a studio in San Francisco via “splitcast” while Kuip worked on-site.

Sure, they were homers — famously getting emotional during a Giants losing skid last year was just one of many examples of that — but in Bay Area sports they were without a doubt an institution.

He was more than happy to toe the partisan San Francisco line when necessary, that included Covid, and lambasting players who refuted Pride Night.

They were fiercely defended by Giants fans, and when I would deride a friend about the commentary duo, he would get borderline apoplectic.

Whenever an established announcer leaves the game, we irreplaceably lose a piece of the era of baseball they were a part of.

I still mourn the loss of Boston Red Sox color man Jerry Remy, and the retirement of forty-two-year radio veteran Joe Castiglione. Neither the NESN nor the WEEI broadcasts are the same since their departure.

The Vin Scullys and the Bob Ueckers of the world come around once in a lifetime, there will be others to follow, and we may grow to love them as well, but they’ll always have the shadow of those that came before them to live up to.

No Quarter

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The NFL has a quarterback problem.

At the conclusion of week two, there are now seven starting quarterbacks who are going to or have been missing time with injuries.

This includes Kyler Murray, Michael Penix, Caleb Williams, and Jayden Daniels.

Roger Goodell decided to continue his social justice stand this year by painting “End Racism” in the back of the end zones again, but he can’t even prevent the systemic racism in the league from wiping out his black quarterbacks.

It sounds preposterous, but it will probably be a topic of discussion on ESPN this week.

I tuned into the Monday Night Football game just long enough to see Jaxson Dart get injured for the Giants, and promptly tuned right back out.

One of the downsides of the league pushing offense and tailoring things to quarterbacks so heavily is that when they get injured, the desire to watch their games absolutely plummets. And the numbers don’t lie.

Recent years have seen injuries to top quarterbacks in Joe Burrow, Patrick Mahomes, Aaron Rodgers, Lamar Jackson and Dak Prescott, and it’s a ratings killer. Last season’s conference championship round drew its smallest combined audience since 2021, with Sportico pointing to the absence of star quarterbacks like Mahomes and Josh Allen.

The major disparity around the league has been between the haves and have-nots when it comes to those rostering a franchise quarterback. There aren’t 32 human beings on earth who can play quarterback at an elite level in the National Football League, and when the ones who can are getting injured en masse at the beginning of the season, it creates a substantially less watchable product.

Thursday Night Football will now feature Michael Penix Jr. starting for the Falcons against the Packers in his first game back after tearing his ACL in week 11 of last season, and Monday Night Football will likely showcase Tyson Bagent under center for the Bears against the Eagles.

Sure, there’s always a chance that somebody steps in and becomes the next Tom Brady. That chance is about one in a billion, but sure, there’s a chance. In the meantime it will produce a lot of lopsided games that end up being stuck in national broadcast and primetime windows.

Sunday Ticket is a huge revenue driver for the league, but it also inhibits them from adapting to these changes on the fly. College Football has every game available on network, cable or ESPN streaming, and will always have the week’s best matchup on national TV.

This Saturday, there are six AP-ranked games, the first time it’s happened since 2023. Networks being able to adjust which games are on which windows also gives them an advantage over the NFL. The NFL has the “flex” system to replace bad primetime matchups with better ones, but it’s rarely used and creates more headaches for fans who have already made travel arrangements to see games.

Expect Roger Goodell to introduce a few more rule changes to protect his cash-cow-quarterbacks even further.

Photo: Dennis-cabrams / Wikimedia Commons

The Ghost Ledger is (Almost) Live

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The real Ghost Ledger that is.

The Clarity Act failed to pass cloture yesterday on the Senate floor.

The core idea behind the Clarity Act is to clearly define how the government would approach different types of cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects, and give specific roles to the regulatory agencies, including new authority for the CFTC to be a watchdog for crypto spot markets. — CoinDesk

Senator John Kennedy believes the bill isn’t dead. He said he wasn’t surprised by the vote, but that “it’s gonna have to wait until the lame duck session.”

It was unlikely that Democrats would approve anything that President Trump could point to as a victory this close to midterms, in spite of the fact that they essentially got all of the changes to the bill they asked for.

This bill does not specifically apply to Bitcoin, which in my article Bitcoin Brain, I defined as something of a blockchain red herring. This bill is about the rails underneath the coming financial system. It never mentions ISO 20022 (the messaging standard the banks have already moved onto) but it decides which tokens are securities under the SEC and which are digital commodities under the CFTC, which is the question the SEC and CFTC already answered for the ISO 20022 coins like XRP in a joint interpretation this March — this bill would write it into law.


Running a validator or staking to secure a network would not, on its own, count as a securities transaction. Exchanges couldn’t pay yield on stablecoins just sitting in your account, but rewards tied to actually using them would still be allowed. Clear rules of the road — the thing institutional money has been waiting on.

The SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) have stated that they are moving forward with their own regulations and rules on the implementation of this technology into the financial system.

Adoption is inevitable.

Along with the ‘mainstreaming’ that is going on, certain influencers seem to have gotten the call that the time to inject this into the collective consciousness has arrived. Including Alex Jones. Alex famously states that he predicted 9/11. My question in response to that is, who gave him that information? He’s been a vessel for seeding information prior to significant events for decades, and now he has this to say:

This is ironic to me, as The Art of the Empire’s in-universe conspiracy podcaster, Dax Winters, interviewed a man who created a technology not dissimilar from the XRP Ledger. It happens in chapter 16 of The Ghost Ledger, book one of The Art of the Empire series.

In some ways, it feels like the book has either predicted this, or memed it into existence. Of course, I say that with all due humility.

And for those interested, the first draft of its anticipated sequel, Project Naked Sky, has been completed, with a launch date that may still make the end of the year. The surge in post-production work on the manuscript is partly to blame for the reduction in publishing on this site the past few days. 

Check out Dax Winters of The Dax Winters Experience interviewing Jonah Kaplan of SunChain Ledger from The Ghost Ledger for a little humor, and a breakdown of the possibilities offered by distributed ledger technology:

The Dax Winters Experience #1206: THE ALCHEMIST – Featuring Jonah Kaplan 

Dax leaned into the desk; fingers interlocked.

“Tonight’s conversation isn’t about Bitcoin. It’s not about Dogecoin. It’s not about your favorite meme token of the month. It’s about what happens after all that. When crypto doesn’t just interrupt the financial system, it becomes it.”

He tapped the desk lightly. No theatrics — just message.

“My guest tonight isn’t trying to build a fanbase. He’s trying to rewire the financial nervous system of the entire world. If he’s right, we’re looking at the end of capital bottlenecks, settlement delays, and debt as we know it. If he’s wrong… he’s just the smartest lunatic I’ve ever had on.”

He smiled faintly.

“Either way, you’re going to want to pay attention.”

The screen split.

On the left: Dax in perfect studio lighting, sharp and composed. On the right: a dim office space — a converted lab turned cryptographers sandbox, cluttered but functional, lit by half-watt fluorescents and the soft blink of diagnostic LEDs.

Jonah Kaplan looked like he’d been dragged off a quantum rail project mid-debug.

Faded hoodie. Wireframe glasses. Hair half-tied back. He was scribbling on a tablet with one hand and adjusting something off-screen with the other when he noticed the stream was live.

“Jonah,” Dax said, grinning. “You’re with us.”

Jonah looked up. “One sec. The cooling node on the validator rig just threw a spike. Probably nothing, but I’d rather not start a fire during the interview.”

He leaned out of frame. A sharp metal clack, then silence.

“There we go,” he said, slipping the tablet off. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be rude.”

“No worries,” Dax said. “You’re famously terrible at introductions. So, I’ll do it.”

He turned slightly toward the camera.

“This is Jonah Kaplan. Some of you know the name. Most of you have no idea how close this guy came to getting disappeared by the same people who now host blockchain conferences for G7 countries. He built the SunChain Ledger. He’s the architect behind its native token, the RAY protocol. He walked away from a classified DARPA lab project in 2014 and started uploading pseudonymous whitepapers that half the industry dismissed — until his code started exposing all the warts in commercial payment rails.”

Dax leaned back, letting that settle.

“He’s not here to pump anything. He’s here because he understands what the world is choking on — and what might clear the air.”

He turned to the screen. “Jonah. Let’s cut through the buzzwords. What is SunChain?”

Jonah nodded once, as if flipping a mental switch.

“It’s a distributed ledger system optimized for frictionless settlement. Global, instant, trustless.”

“Okay,” Dax said, “Talk to me like I’m a CFO. What’s it actually do?”

“It replaces the financial middle layer,” Jonah replied. “All of it. No more days-long wire transfers. No more Swift. No more needing Visa to approve a purchase at midnight on a weekend. If I send money to you across the world — it settles instantly. No bank has to ‘clear it.’ The validators handle that.”

“And what are validators?”

“Decentralized nodes,” Jonah said. “No central server. No third-party clearinghouse. Each node verifies transactions independently. If enough of them agree — the network accepts it as true. The transaction locks in.”

“Why does that matter?”

Jonah’s eyes lit slightly.

“Because right now, we have trillions of dollars locked in escrow accounts. Corporations, banks, governments — they all keep money parked just to cover delays and settlement lag. SunChain removes the lag. That capital comes back online.”

Dax whistled softly. “You’re saying it frees up—”

“Global liquidity,” Jonah said. “That’s the first domino.”

Dax leaned back. “But hang on — for the folks at home who think blockchain is just internet monopoly money — break it down real simple. What is this thing?”

Jonah’s eyes lit up slightly, shifting into teacher mode.

“Think of it like a ledger — a record book. But instead of one bank keeping their own private ledger that only they control, this ledger is copied across thousands of computers worldwide. Every transaction gets recorded on all of them simultaneously. You can’t forge an entry because everyone has the same copy. You can’t delete history because it’s written everywhere at once. And you can’t shut it down because there’s no central office to raid.”

“So, it’s like if everyone in town had an identical copy of the same checkbook, and they all had to agree before any check cleared?”

“Exactly. Except the whole world is the town. And once something’s written, it’s there forever.”

Dax nodded. “And the RAY token?”

“We called it RAY — Reciprocal Asset Yield. Because that’s what this is. Not interest. Not speculation. But a mutual return. You bring value into this ecosystem — RAY makes sure it’s reflected back.”

Jonah adjusted his glasses before continuing.

“It does that because it’s the transfer medium,” Jonah said. “You use RAY to bridge currencies, move value, tokenize assets. And I don’t just mean money. Real Estate. Commodities. Contracts. A shipment of wheat. An intellectual property license. A national bond. If it can be tracked or priced — it can be tokenized and traded 24/7 with no intermediary.”

“You’re talking about a 24/7 global trading desk for everything,” Dax said.

“Yes,” Jonah said. “On-chain, in real time, with zero counterparty risk.”

“Debt?” Dax asked.

Jonah didn’t blink.

“Already solved.”

“No shit? Go on.”

“We tokenize it. The U.S. doesn’t need to owe China anymore. Think Digital Treasuries issued as blockchain assets — fully transparent, interest-bearing, with built-in terms. America can sell that debt on a global market instantly. Anyone in the world can hold a piece; sovereigns, investment banks, retail traders. You remove the geopolitical hostage element — and you gain velocity.”

Dax narrowed his eyes.

“What about the fifty billion RAY tokens still locked up in escrow? You’re telling me SunChain Labs doesn’t control more than half the total supply?”

Jonah didn’t flinch.

“That escrow exists for a reason — over-the-counter sales, seeding the ecosystem, supporting startups that build on our rails. Those coins are time-released. No dumping, no market shock. Structured allocation only.”

Dax cocked his head to the side.

“To who?”
 Dax pressed him.

“Is it major banks? Remittance networks. Institutional partners. I’ve heard some big players are already under NDA. But I’ve seen names — Western Union, Wall Street firms… even the Fed has been floating the idea of replacing SWIFT.”

Dax shook his head slightly and continued.

“I mean, all of that said, RAY is sitting there at thirty-seven cents right now. Some people think it’s a dead coin.”

The left side of Jonah’s mouth curled slightly.

“There are real-world use cases for RAY, including the ones you just alluded to. Several adoption agreements are waiting on regulatory frameworks. I can’t comment beyond that.”

Dax paused. A silence, weighty and measured, then he spoke.

“Let me tell you who’s trying to hold them.”

The lighting on Dax’s side of the screen dimmed a touch. The studio map shifted — red pulses overtaking blue on the LED screen.

“You think the people at the World Economic Forum haven’t heard this pitch? You think the bankers don’t want real-time settlements — as long as they decide what settles and who gets to transact?”

He held up a finger.

“CBDCs. Central Bank Digital Currencies. Sound familiar? Same tech. Different leash. Instead of open, neutral, and voluntary — it’s mandatory, programmable, and surveilled. You post the wrong meme? They freeze your account. You didn’t take your booster? You can’t board the train.”

Jonah stayed silent. He knew this part of the conversation was de rigueur for a Dax show appearance.

“This interview isn’t about crypto,” Dax said, turning back to the lens. “It’s about control. Either we build a system that liberates… or they’ll build one that enslaves.”

He tapped the desk once more. Quiet.

“You have the map now. Choose your path wisely.”

The screen faded to black.

Football Fun Index

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The 2026 NFL season kicks off tonight with a rematch of February’s Super Bowl. The Seahawks unveil their second banner while the New England Patriots visit. We’ll see the debut of A.J. Brown in a Patriots uniform, and Mike Vrabel’s first regular season game coaching since his six year affair with The Athletic’s NFL Insider Dianna Russini was exposed this spring.

The Seahawks should enjoy the ceremony this evening, as Washington has adopted a new “Millionaires Tax,” charging a 9.9% rate to all earnings over $1 million. This will effectively give them 5-7% less cap space per year, depending on their road schedule. It doesn’t take effect until 2028, but it is going to be a consideration every player and agent makes when they sit down to sign a contract in Seattle. This will also be their first game since announcing new ownership. And it’s not very promising either, Vinod Khosla talked lavishly about being a diehard Steelers fan and still watching every one of their games in his introductory presser.

The NFL used to be a way of life for me. I knew nearly every rostered player, would study mock drafts and prospects for months in the spring, knew every coach and most of the coordinators. A lot of that luster has faded. If I had to sum up the reason why, I’d simply say, Roger Goodell. He has been a poor steward of the game in my estimation. I’ll happily dive into that topic another day, but a perfect example is him fining running backs for lowering their shoulder and delivering contact to a defender.

While the NFL isn’t the draw for me it once was, I still like to follow the sport, and in particular like to follow teams with interesting storylines, exciting players, or just straight up trainwrecks I can’t look away from. Teams that actually make the game fun. Matchups, announce crews, broadcast windows all play a factor in whether I tune in or not, but a major factor is whether the teams are actually enjoyable to watch. So without further ado, here is the official 2026 Football Fun Index.

Honorable Mentions

Las Vegas Raiders

In my Pro-Am Triple Crown article, the Raiders were described as a potentially ascendant team with a possible franchise quarterback to be, first overall pick, Heisman trophy winner and National Champion, Fernando Mendoza. But he’s only a part of why they make the list. New acquisitions in free agency, highly talented returning players in Brock Bowers, Maxx Crosby and Ashton Jeanty, and Super Bowl winning offensive coordinator from the Seahawks, Klint Kubiak, in as a first year Head Coach. Also, Kirk Cousins starting the season under center. The new building in Vegas hasn’t played host to a relevant Raiders team yet, and this could have the foundations of getting there in the next few years.

Pittsburgh Steelers

This is it for Aaron Rodgers, back for one more rodeo along with his former Packers Super Bowl winning coach Mike McCarthy, he takes over after Mike Tomlin stepped down at the end of a 19 year run that saw him win a Super Bowl and never once post a losing season.

Rodgers has a talented defense, some new pieces on offense in Michael Pittman Jr., Rico Dowdle and rookie second-rounder Germie Bernard, and has been all smiles since the Anthony Fauci Covid Chronicles were released and the beleaguered former NIAID director invoked the fifth amendment 111 times in a Senate hearing, even though Joe Biden had already handed him a preemptive pardon.

Buffalo Bills

A new stadium, a new head coach, and an old familiar curse. Coach Joe Brady steps into the head coaching role after two and a half seasons as the play-caller for the Bills with the most pressure of any new coach in the league. It’s super bowl or bust for Buffalo, and with a roster that isn’t at the caliber of the other top NFL teams, and an opening five game slate that includes Houston, Detroit, LA Chargers, New England and LA Rams, the Bills could be in a tough position heading into their sixth game in Las Vegas.

But they return Josh Allen two years removed from an MVP season, a true X receiver in DJ Moore, Bradley Chubb and TJ Parker on the edge on defense, and plenty of reason for optimism. I will say, as a Bills fan, their games are only fun when they’re winning. With a tough schedule and little room for error, that could break either way early.

Now onto the top five: 

5. New York Giants

This pick may surprise people, but the pieces are in place for something special to begin. First year Head Coach John Harbaugh takes over in New Jersey after 18 years at the helm in Baltimore. Including a super bowl title during that reign. Second year QB Jaxson Dart, fresh off his introduction of the President of the United States that humorously caused a media meltdown, and a brain dead response from teammate Abdul Carter, they have some serious weapons on both sides of the ball. Along with Carter, the pass rush looks stout with Kayvon Thibodeaux and Brian Burns, and as a group they’re probably the best set of edge rushers any team in the league can put on the field. I also think they drafted the best player in the rookie class in Arvell Reese all the way down at number 5 overall. Reese played all linebacker positions for the Buckeyes and has too much athleticism and instinct to not produce on sundays. They also drafted Francis Mauigoa at tackle from the U at number 10. They get elite WR Malik Nabers back from an ACL, and football maniac Cam Skattebo back from a dislocated ankle, fractured fibula and torn deltoid ligament suffered in Week 8 against Philadelphia. How effective they’ll be this year post injury remains to be seen, and they still have the turf of doom that causes so many of these injuries to play on.

4. Detroit Lions

As long as the o-line holds up, I’m calling the Lions being back. Too much talent, too much pride, and too much grit to stay down. Dan Campbell should have his team back in the hunt. I look forward to their games, have plenty of favorites in their roster (Penei Sewell, Aidan Hutchinson, Sam LaPorta, Jack Campbell), and giving them back their underdog status could produce the chip on their shoulder needed to take the next step.

3. Los Angeles Chargers

I love Jim Harbaugh. He’s a football psychopath. It was just a matter of time before he corrected the ship after being hired back to the league from Michigan. There are serious pieces there, and the added dynamic of bringing in Mike McDaniel, the anti-Harbaugh as a head coach, as Offensive Coordinator could give them an explosive and dynamic point-scoring machine they haven’t had under Harbaugh’s current regime. Looking forward to how their season plays out.

2. Chicago Bears

Da Bears are back. Will they compete for a Super Bowl? I highly doubt it. Ben Johnson is the best young coach in the league, and he gets to show off what year two in his program looks like. Caleb Williams has been appearing in public with a more masculine look, and even showing up sans nail polish, so you better believe the NFC North has been put on notice. This team won seven games last year after trailing inside the final two minutes. Plenty of weapons on offense in Rome Odunze, Luther Burden III, Colston Loveland, Cole Kmet and D’Andre Swift, but a defense that got gutted this offseason, losing Tremaine Edmunds, Kevin Byard, Jaquan Brisker and C.J. Gardner-Johnson. While the Bears have a lot of positives, questions about that defense keep them from the top spot. There’s also the fact that DJ Moore is now in Buffalo, so Odunze will have to step into a larger role. 

Last year they became an even bigger favorite of mine by erasing an 18 point halftime deficit against Green Bay in the Wild Card round at Soldier Field in legendary fashion.

1. Los Angeles Rams

I have been a Rams hater for a while. In my opinion, they appeared to have been gifted the Super Bowl against Cincinnati with endless last drive penalties until they finally got the game winning score. The conspiracy portion of my brain (essentially the whole thing), thought they did so because the Super Bowl was in LA, the Rams had moved back there and weren’t gaining traction, and in crowning them the fairweather fans of the region could hop on board. 

Something else that gave me a sour taste was Matt Stafford’s wife going on a podcast to brag about running around with Matt’s backup quarterback at Georgia to make him jealous. Yuck.

On top of that, when Amazon secured Thursday Night Football in a landmark deal with the league, they offered the color commentary position to Sean McVay, who was at the time considering stepping aside from coaching. Instead the position went to my least favorite announcer on earth Kirk Herbstreit. Now Americans are forced to endure his commentary for both the Thursday night game, and the ABC primetime college football game on Saturday, as well as his presence on College Gameday if they’re so inclined to watch that. Personally, I’m more of a Big Noon Kickoff guy myself. Brady Quinn, Matt Leinart and Joel Klatt clear the Gameday crew, even though I love the addition of Nick Saban. McVay could have saved us from Herbstreit, and for that I held a grudge.

But the time to bury the hatchet has come, in spite of Herbie, I’m glad that McVay, who is a brilliant football mind, is still coaching in the league. And the addition of Myles Garrett and the return of Aaron Donald, and cornerback Trent McDuffie have their defense looking nicey.  We can’t forget Puka Nacua, who is coming off an all time offseason where he appeared to be inebriated at a UFC card this spring, was sued over an alleged biting incident and an alleged antisemitic remark, entered rehab, and is out in time to rejoin the Super Bowl favorites.

It’s clear I’ve had my issues with this team in the past, but things change. There’s no question they will be the team to watch this year. Their owner Stan Kroenke also just liberated the baseball world from Arte Moreno’s disastrous 23 year tenure as owner of the Angels, and if the Rams can keep the Chiefs, Ravens or Eagles from winning it all, isn’t that a good thing?

The Rams are must see TV, they take the top spot on this year’s index, and they start their quest for the Lombardi tomorrow night in Melbourne against the 49ers.

I’ll have my eye on all of these teams as the season gets underway.

My Super Bowl Prediction:

Lions over Bills

Bills finally get back to the big game, and a curse is at long last ended, but in ironic fashion that only Bills Mafia can truly appreciate, the curse that is broken belongs to their opponent, and the Lions grab their first ever Lombardi trophy.

Rams are loaded, but myself and everyone else anointing them as the team to beat is giving 2011 Eagles paper champion vibes.

When something looks like a sure thing at the beginning of the season, it usually isn’t.

Photo: Erik Drost / Cropped (CC BY 2.0)

Categories NFL

Going Nuclear

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The conservative party in power has actually presented something that would help the American family.

The Department of Health and Human Services is drafting a rule change that would pay married parents roughly $9,000 a year per child to stay home and raise them. The money comes out of the Child Care and Development Fund, a $12 billion Clinton-era program built to pay for daycare so parents could go to work. To qualify you have to be married, and one spouse has to be putting in at least 35 hours a week. It doesn’t need a bill or a vote — just White House sign-off and a comment period.

This, if followed as presented, would be one of the most pro-family policies to come out of Washington since the mid-20th century.

“Parents who bear the toil, expense and opportunity cost… currently get zero.” — Roger Severino

When our birthrate was declining, I found it mighty peculiar that the only remedy presented for this problem was infinite immigration from all parts of the non-westernized world. It certainly wasn’t to create policy that encouraged and enabled the native population of the nation to start families. (Yes, Americans are a nation. It was considered people living in America of European descent.) Hungary has offered tax incentives for having children — mothers of four or more have paid no income tax for life since 2020, and Orbán has since dropped that threshold to two. Russia pays lump sums for births with regional bonuses stacked on top. China ended the one-child policy in 2015 and finally started cutting checks last year — 3,600 yuan, about $500, every year until the kid turns three. That’s real money in a country where the average rural person lives on about $3,500 a year.

Why worry about the people of your nation reproducing when there’s billions of people ready to flood into your country that you can hand jobs and small business loans to! The SBA refused to even list country of origin for these loans they’re giving out. To this administration’s credit, the SBA finally shut that window in March. Green card holders are barred from 7(a) loans entirely now. It only took until 2026.

The key element of this childcare rule change that must be maintained for it to actually be a “pro-family” policy, is that it must only apply to married individuals. Married-couple households were 74% of this country in 1960. They’ve been under 50% since 2010. Children born to unwed mothers went from 5% to roughly 40% across the same stretch, and the share of kids living with only their mother nearly tripled. It’s as if the Great Society had the opposite effect of its title. The numbers don’t lie.

Automation and AI are coming and will utlimately wreak havoc upon the labor market once the new paradigm is built. The people who want to sell you the idea that “they’ll just create new jobs, someone has to work on the robots!” Yes, someone does have to work on the robots, and at some point it will be another robot. In the meantime, one mechanic servicing a fleet of 500 robots who have replaced 3 human workers each does not offer industrial revolution labor growth.

A lot of people are going to be out of the work force anyway, moving into familial support roles is the most desirable outcome.

This would pair perfectly with a home-school voucher in the $7k per child range. Public schools spent $17,619 per pupil in FY2024, the highest figure ever recorded. The federal slice of that is about $2,500. Tearing down the indoctrinating and ineffective school system would help accelerate the nation’s flight from the grasps of cultural marxism.

Private, cooperative and religious schools would thrive. Sure, the inner cities would be a mess, many of the kids wouldn’t be able to pass basic reading or mathematics proficiency. Oh wait, we’re already there. Five percent of Detroit fourth graders were proficient in reading in 2024. Cleveland was at eight. Nine percent of Baltimore eighth graders were proficient in math.

My instincts, or political whiplash conditioning, tell me this may be another policy that will have been presented first as a good idea, get railroaded by the media and the Democrats, then get walked back, turned into something completely ineffective, and yet still victory will be declared.

But that is certainly not my hope.

This change is one that is worth fighting for.

“Don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family again.” — Michael Corleone

Photo: Norman Rockwell, Freedom of Want (1943), public domain.

Sex, Drugs, and College Football

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North Carolina came in at number two on our College Football Crisis Rankings, and that may need to be elevated after a decent showing by number one ranked CU last night, oh, and this absolutely insane report about the Tar Heels that came out before the Buffaloes kicked off.

University of North Carolina football general manager Michael Lombardi, the highest-paid general manager in college football, resigned Thursday after a tumultuous tenure in Chapel Hill working alongside Bill Belichick, the university said. 

But the investigation is still ongoing, and lawyers hired by the university are now focused on behaviors by defensive coordinator Steve Belichick, people familiar with the investigation tell WRAL.

Colorado went into Atlanta and beat Georgia Tech 14-13, Julian Lewis hitting Charlie Williams for the go ahead touchdown in the final minute. Then blocked the Yellow Jackets’ attempt at a game winning field-goal to secure the victory. 

Amazingly, both teams began the season 1-0. Another reason that College Football is the absolute best. 

University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill is one of the most epic party schools in the country. And that’s just the Football staff.

Self-described Football Genius, Michael Lombardi abruptly resigned as UNC’s general manager Thursday, a month after being placed on paid administrative leave, and hours before WRAL published what the investigators have actually been asking about. Lawyers hired by the university have been questioning people about whether defensive coordinator Steve Belichick used drugs on the job, or handed them to at least one player. Steve has been on medical leave since early August.

And that’s only half of it. The same lawyers have been asking whether a female member of the recruiting staff had a sexual relationship with a player, and separately, whether assistant coaches were sleeping with the recruiting staff.

Can we add this to the list of benefits to come from women being shoehorned into coaching and staff positions in this sport?

“The head coach’s tenure has generated far more off-field headlines than on-field success.” — WRAL

Bill being Bill, he appears unfazed. And honestly, that’s part of what I love about the guy. The fact that the media, in particular the Boston sports media that has been trying to claim his scalp for years and continues to do so while he’s down in Chapel Hill, still can’t get him to change, apologize, or bow down to their demands. I loved the surly, poker-face press conferences he gave in New England. But I will not pretend he hasn’t done irreparable damage to his reputation since Brady left Foxborough. And many would argue, it wasn’t too hot back then either.  In this case, things appear to be getting uglier than they did in Foxborough, Aaron Hernandez aside. And still, they got pretty ugly.

People thought Bill having a 25 year old girlfriend was the craziest thing about the situation. Chapel Bill, one of the many nicknames that he trademark-rushed the second he took the UNC job, or as I am dubbing him, Boner Pill Bill, is the staff member who appears to have his personal life the most together. But clearly his efficacy as the leader of a Power 4 football program is abysmal. 

Having first-year Tar Heel Offensive Coordinator Bobby Petrino in the house for this really is the perfect garnish. Arkansas fired Petrino for cause in April 2012 after he laid his Harley down on Highway 16 with 25-year-old Jessica Dorrell on the back. He held a press conference two days later in a neck brace and said he was riding alone.

Dorrell was a former Arkansas volleyball player he had just hired onto the football staff at $55,735 a year, picked out of 159 applicants after an unusually short search, four days before the crash. He had also given her $20,000, which she used to buy a car. The state police report was about to go public, so he finally told his athletic director. He lost an $18 million buyout over it.

In true Bill Belichick fashion, amidst a storm of chaos, he pulled off a massive upset win over the TCU Horned Frogs last Saturday in Dublin, Ireland.

He’s not here to make sure people aren’t getting high and getting freaky, he only requires that you Do Your Job.

With this hellstorm, Belichick has accomplished in a year and a half what it takes other coaches decades to pull off. Another reason he’s the GOAT. 

Lane Kiffin, the King of Horny Coaches, burning bridges, and bringing ex-NFL players to college football, it’s your move pal. 

Photo: Hameltion (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Ball’s Clipped

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The Los Angeles Clippers have been handed the basketball equivalent of the death penalty.

The NBA has stripped the Los Angeles Clippers of five first-round draft picks and fined owner Steve Ballmer $30 million at the conclusion of its probe into allegations that All-Star Kawhi Leonard received impermissible benefits during his tenure with the team in violation of the league’s salary cap.

The league is also fining Leonard $700,000.

The NBA announced the decision Wednesday. The Clippers will be stripped of first-round picks in the 2029, 2030, 2031, 2032, and 2033 NBA Drafts.

The league is also suspending Ballmer “from all league and team activities for one year.” — Yahoo Sports

And that’s just the top of it. Gillian Zucker, president of business operations, suspended a year without pay — directly culpable, and she lied to investigators. Lawrence Frank, president of basketball operations, six months. Five years of league compliance monitoring. Kawhi’s uncle and former business manager Dennis Robertson barred from doing business with NBA teams on behalf of any player for five years.

Here’s what they were accused of doing. Ballmer put $50 million of his own money into a “green bank” called Aspiration in September 2021. Later that month the Clippers announced a $300 million partnership with the same company. In April 2022 — nine months after Kawhi signed a four-year, $176.3 million max deal — Aspiration signed Kawhi to a four-year, $28 million endorsement contract through his LLC, KL2 Aspire. The contract let Kawhi decline to do anything the company asked. It also voided if he left the Clippers. Aspiration went bankrupt, its co-founder is doing 14 years in federal prison, and Kawhi never publicly endorsed a thing. Pablo Torre reported it, and won a Pulitzer for it. The league’s outside law firm spent a year confirming the details. Aspiration wasn’t alone either — investigators found the same pattern with Boingo Wireless, Daktronics, and Lockton, all of them doing business with the team. The Clippers also covered personal expenses for Kawhi and his family.

“I am deeply disappointed by the flagrant violations of our rules” — Adam Silver

The team shows no signs of surrender. “We vehemently reject the NBA’s findings” — the Clippers, who called the investigation biased and built backward from a predetermined conclusion, and said what the league told them privately doesn’t match what it announced publicly.

Now compare this to last October. The FBI arrested Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Heat guard Terry Rozier on the same morning, 34 people indicted across two cases, rigged poker games backed by the Mafia and insider prop betting on a player faking an injury. Actual crimes. Federal indictments. And what happened to Portland and Miami? Nothing. The league put two men on leave and let the franchises walk. Jontay Porter got a lifetime ban in 2024 and Toronto didn’t lose a second-round pick over it.

Gambling gets individuals in trouble, touching the salary cap gets your franchise gutted for a decade. The NBA actually does draw the line somewhere, at least there’s that.

Ballmer is the white knight who rode in to save the league from Donald Sterling. April of 2014, Sterling’s silly rabbit — her words, V. Stiviano on national television, to Barbara Walters — recorded him telling her not to bring Black people to Clippers games, Magic Johnson by name, and the tape went to TMZ. Adam Silver banned him for life, fined him the maximum $2.5 million, and moved to force a sale. Shelly Sterling had her husband declared incapacitated and sold the team to Ballmer for a then-record $2 billion. Twelve years later another scandal has rocked the team and the league.


Steve Ballmer made his fortune as a pitch-man for Windows. Not a software or engineering background, he did what the nerds can’t always do (Steve Jobs not included), he moved fucking product.

Ballmer paid $2b for a new super state of the art arena in Inglewood, and he is barred from watching his team in it for the next twelve months.

He should have placed a bid on the Angels to keep him busy in the meantime, he has the scratch lying around.

I like Steve Ballmer, he’s an absolute psychopath in a way that makes for great content and sports radio fodder. And he is obsessed with winning, something sports fans claim to want from their owners more than anything else, well that and paying for their own stadiums, which Ballmer also did.

Five first round picks being stripped away, plus California’s 13.3% tax rate, and the big brother Lakers still being the A side in town, the Clippers need a miracle to compete for a title again in the next decade.

But I guess when you put it that way, the sanctions may end up having little effect on them.

Photo: All-Pro Reels — CC BY-SA 2.0

X Money X Problems

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This week X, formerly Twitter, began the rollout of X Money. This has been something I have been anticipating since Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in 2022.

“X Money is designed to make traditional bank accounts unnecessary for users.” — The Paypers

X Money is not simply a feature of X, but may be the reason Elon acquired the social media platform to begin with. Elon had originally envisioned X.com as a payments system all the way back in 1999. The concept behind it would go on to become PayPal. Elon has long understood the potential for innovation and opportunity when payments and finance finally merge with technology in a truly meaningful way. Far beyond the reaches of what CashApp and PayPal offer today.

X is positioning itself to become the WeChat of the rest of the world.

WeChat is China’s everything app, and has been for over a decade. Tencent launched it as a messaging service in 2011. Today it runs about 1.43 billion monthly users. It’s messaging, it’s a social feed, it’s video, and it’s WeChat Pay — roughly 935 million people paying for things by scanning a QR code, from a department store checkout down to a guy selling fruit off a cart. But the part Americans consistently miss is Mini Programs. These are app-like services that run inside WeChat itself, 4.3 million of them, used by around 945 million people a month. You book the doctor, hail the cab, pay the power bill, order dinner, buy the movie ticket, and file your government paperwork without ever leaving the app or downloading a single thing. You don’t have twelve apps, twelve logins, and twelve saved credit cards. You have one.

Yes, the Chinese version is restrictive, surveillance heavy, and censored. That’s not the part I’m pointing at. The singular model is the point. Whether we end up with their version of it here is a separate question.

Nobody in the West has built it — not because it can’t be built, but because the pieces were always owned by different companies with no reason to cooperate. Apple owns the wallet. Meta owns the social graph. Your bank owns the settlement layer. Elon is the first person sitting on all three at once.

X Money is offering Premium users 4% on their Stored Value Accounts and to its Premium+ users, 6%. Yes, 6% on cash you have parked in the X account, and they’re issuing digital debit cards and physical metal Visa cards. The card drops into Apple Pay and Google Pay, and a virtual version is issued the moment you sign up, so you’re spending before the metal one hits your mailbox. Not in New York, though — no money transmitter license there, which means no APY at all for New York residents. Massachusetts is out entirely. It’s live in 41 states plus D.C.

They have also partnered with Cross River Bank as their sponsor bank. X isn’t a bank and doesn’t hold a charter, so Cross River provides the charter, the FDIC-insured deposits, the compliance backbone and the payment rails. This is the banking-as-a-service model, and Cross River is effectively the bank behind fintech — a state-chartered New Jersey outfit in Fort Lee running more than 120 clients including Stripe, Affirm, Coinbase, Best Egg and Upstart on an $8 billion balance sheet. If you’ve ever financed a purchase through Affirm or moved money through Coinbase, Cross River probably executed it and you never knew their name. Deposits are insured to $250,000, with up to $10 million available through a cash sweep across partner institutions.

And the Stored Value Account doesn’t have to stop at cash. Right now X is paying 4% to Premium and 6% to Premium+ on dollars parked in the app. Let users hold stablecoins in that same account and the yield options widen considerably — tokenized Treasuries, on-chain lending, staking proof-of-stake assets like Ethereum or Solana. Your checking account, your savings account, and your brokerage stop being three separate things you log into.

There has been talk about “paying in crypto” with X Money, but I think that is the wrong angle to look at this. The GENIUS Act that passed in July 2025 by the US and signed by President Trump allows for a company like X to issue its own stablecoin, a cryptocurrency pegged one-to-one to a dollar and backed by reserves the issuer is legally obligated to redeem at face value, but they don’t even need to do that. They can allow X users to hold existing stablecoins (RLUSD, USDC) in their X value accounts, then transact them with merchants, peers, make payments, settling them with a blockchain like Solana, Ripple or Stellar as the middle layer. This will happen instantly and appear just as normal to someone as your standard PayPal transaction, but real-time settlement, with negligible fees on a ledger that confirms it for both sides. The change isn’t sending .0001 Bitcoin or Ethereum to pay for your burrito bowl, it’s that you don’t even see that layer underneath.

Innovation’s most bearish babe, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrote Musk in April flagging what she called a “suspicious carveout” that lets a private commercial company like X issue its own stablecoin, and noted that Thune had blocked a bipartisan floor amendment to close it. She’s right about the mechanism. She’s just wrong about which part should worry anyone.

When you swipe a card today, the transaction looks instant. It isn’t. What happened was an authorization — a promise. The real money moves later, batched overnight, run through the card network, settled between the merchant’s bank and yours over the next day or three. Venmo and Cash App are the same trick. Your balance updates the second you hit send because the app is just moving a number from one row of its own ledger to another row of its own ledger. The actual dollars are still sitting at a bank, waiting on ACH.

Distributed ledger technology collapses all of it. The transfer is the settlement. There is no authorization, then clearing, then settlement — there’s one event on a ledger both sides can verify, running 24 hours. That’s the important change. Not the currency, the plumbing. If it seems inconsequential, it frees up trillions of dollars in capital currently kept in limbo when done at scale.

X Money can put that in the palm of your hand. (Yes, perhaps like the Mark of the Beast.)

The move could potentially merge banking, investing, social media and AI into a singular app.

“When I say payments, I actually mean someone’s entire financial life.” — Elon Musk

The concept of the “everything app” is the next evolution in the “everything phone,” the smart phone. A smart-app that allows users to go back and forth between all of these aspects seamlessly, when done well, reduces friction to such a degree that adoption becomes inevitable.

The future is already being born. The good thing about it is that it only comes one day at a time.

Photo: Daniel Oberhaus, CC BY-SA 4.0