Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Friday, August 4th, and today we are doing a primer on LK-99.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation,

come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes

or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Well, friends, there are a lot of jokes going around Twitter

about people pivoting from crypto to artificial intelligence to finally now moving on to

superconductors. And so, of course, I decided to completely embody that stereotype

and do the primer show on LK99. Now, in all seriousness, you know that the frame for everything on

the breakdown network is big picture power shifts. And if this ends up being real, it would

certainly qualify. So, today's goal is to give all of us lay folks and non-experts

out there a base level understanding in what the hell is going on, so we can try to follow along

and understand how excited or, on the other hand, disappointed to be, as more news comes out.

So what we are talking about is, of course, that in late July, a pair of scientific

papers were published, claiming to have synthesized a superconducting material that operates at

room temperature and ambient pressure. The material was named LK99. Now initially, some optimists were

very excited, but by and large, the response was skeptical. This type of superconductor had been the

subject of high-profile scientific fraud just a few years ago, and some of the data presented

in the paper seemed questionable. The following week, one of the authors of the paper, Young Juan

Kwan, presented his team's findings at Korea University. And just to add more intrigue to the whole

thing, his appearance

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