Well, hey, everybody. Welcome to the new Unlimited Hangout video podcast. I'm Whitney Webb,
founding and contributing editor of unlimited hangout hey Whitney nice to be
here I'm Mark Goodwin I also help out at unlimited hangout and doing the
production for the show very fun happy to be here on our first episode thanks
for having me yeah of course it turns out you'll be on every yeah that's how
we planned it anyway so you didn't say it in your intro of yourself but you also
write for unlimited hangout beyond just helping out that's true and people may
have noticed that our most recent article written by by you and me about
polymarket created a little bit of a stir stir that's the best word for it
yeah yes yes so that happened but before we get into that I guess we should talk
about why we're doing a show because I don't know you may have noticed that
there's been videos of me that aren't like videos I have done in the past on
YouTube of course that's because they're not me they're something else yeah well
I've talked about it before you may if you follow me on Twitter X whatever you
may have seen my pinned tweet which is about you know an AI impersonation
problem I've had for a few years. Talked to James Corbett about it a few years ago. But basically,
if you've been watching a video of me on YouTube in the past like two years, there's like a 90%
chance I had nothing to do with it. And it's not even me or it's either an AI me or AI slop of me.
So the best way to fight that, I guess is, you know, we have to make our own YouTube channel to
be able to report spam or impersonations on YouTube. This is this is how we have to fight
the sloppocalypse in general is just make original content and do cool stuff.
Put yourself out there. Hang out. You know, it's kind of a...
Obviously, we write dense articles. We got a lot of dense stuff to talk about today.
But be original, be sincere, be yourself.
And, you know, obviously we're not going to be as, you know, like to the point as if we were running some AI slop teleprompter thing, you know.
But we're humans and that's what's cool about us. Yeah humans and here we are to do some human stuff
And we wrote about some humans with this piece. Yes, hello fellow humans
and we wrote about some humans in this in this piece and
You know obviously we got some some interesting reactions from humans when we put out this piece
You know we want to obviously get into the piece
but we do think it's maybe an important coloring just before we have this discussion of like
we got a bunch of crazy feedback and a bunch of people said a bunch of mean yeah well it's kind of
one of those microcosms of what it's like to make content today yeah like especially if you're a
writer of long form articles as we are yes um because people like react intensely without
reading anything oh yeah um and it's funny because most of that comes from the the crowd of people
that claim to be like against that and claim to be like the facts over feelings people and are now,
you know, since 2024, pretty much the opposite. Yeah. Yeah. So our article, I guess we should
talk about it for people that haven't seen it, was about Polymarket, the now, you know,
almost ubiquitous prediction market platform. Yeah. That's done a bunch of media partnerships
and we'll talk about this at a future date because this is part one that we published.
We have a part two, but they have plans to change the future of journalism forever,
among other things, forever.
So yeah, we'll be talking about that at a future date.
But part one is basically just about the origins and context that created Polymarket.
And so to promote the piece, I mentioned one, I thought, interesting nugget
because it's the most obvious thing, I guess, that Shane Copeland, the Polymarket founder,
Right.
Explicitly tried to obfuscate from his past. So I made a little note of that in the tweet
being like, look at what they obfuscated, which was a tie to a previous company he's
never talked about called Token Union or Token Bank or like very, very few articles. And there's
been tons written about the guy.
Right.
it but none really looked in even with those references there was no discussion
of the company really at all so obviously we discussed it and we one of
the things we mentioned in the tweet or I mentioned in the tweet was that it was
intimately integrated with and connected to Bancor which is which was co-founded
by Benjamin Netanyahu's niece and nephew and so like because of that even though
later on in the tweet I talked about what the articles really about which is
how Polymarket is essentially a privatized DARPA program from the early 2000s.
So it's really about DARPA and like the Peter Thiel verse and US intelligence.
People just assumed it was all about like Israel.
And so we got a lot of accusations about being anti-Semitic and like other stuff that wasn't
really related to the piece at all.
So it's just kind of one of those examples where people like harp in on something.
And of course, the people that were most mad are like either Polymarket fanboys or employees of platforms that are partnered with Polymarket.
Right.
X itself or formerly Twitter.
Yeah.
Being a big one.
And so Nikita Beer, is that how you say his name?
I don't know.
That guy.
Yeah.
Called you mentally ill.
Yeah.
Well, a lot of people that were triggered by it that also admittedly didn't read the article called us mentally ill.
Yeah.
Which, you know, Whitney was just using an example basically to say this guy's origin
story is full of shit, which it is.
And the example she happened to use involved the name Netanyahu and Israeli VCs and Israeli
interests, these advisors that were at that company he was doing before.
Polymarket, all of it is true.
Article has absolutely nothing to do with Jews or Israel or whatever.
It's ridiculous.
the article it has way more to do with the privatization of military programs
and so we're getting into all that right now but we wanted to just start that off
at the top it's like one of the reasons why we're doing this show in general
despite the AI impersonation thing that Whitney talked about is like people
don't read that much and we want to make sure that you know we're able to
explain ourselves and tell the story for those that don't read so the secret
history of Paulie market part one from a limited hangout comm from Whitney Webb
and mark goodwin here we are so i guess a good place to start is just like what is a prediction
market i guess and this idea of a prediction market is well hey let's set up a market just
like we have for financial products commodities you know currencies stocks equities bonds whatever
let's create a market just like that buyers and sellers but for you know predictive outcomes so
you know world cups blowing up right now so uh you know argentina will argentina win the world cup
yes or no it's this binary outcome and you can vote on who's going to win the world cup is
argentina going to win the world cup and you can buy essentially like shares in the yes or shares
in the no and then of course there are non-binary outcomes like you know who will be the next fed
chair, you know, Kevin Warsh or, you know, Nancy Sheldon, Judy Sheldon or whatever.
And, you know, there can be more than two.
There can be like four or five and you can buy shares based on that.
So prediction markets are sort of a simple idea, but with really crazy consequences and
intentions and just, you know, real world applications that are very interesting and
that we're going to get into all that before we get into all that of like where it's going,
which is mostly what part two is going to be like.
You know, we kind of have to explain like who created these, where did they come from?
Right.
And what are they doing now?
Right.
So as we know in the article, basically the first prediction market came out in the late
eighties, University of Iowa.
It was like an academic experiment and they got a waiver from the CFTC to operate their
prediction market as long as it was run solely for academic purposes.
And I think experimental purposes also.
Yeah.
timing on that it was it was founded in 88 or started I forget the exact little
bit before but it was around the first Bush senior yeah the 1988 presidential
election which is interesting because even like years later you know poly
market it's a rise to popularity is generally also coincided with US
presidential election smart okay so sometimes anyway that was basically kind
of a closed system like anyone could apply but they couldn promote it and you could the amount of money you could wager on any given thing was was pretty small but then this guy who we be talking a lot about named uh robin hansen developed this
idea called uh of idea futures right in the early 90s and he had been sort of like a contractor for
lockheed and nasa writing about a ai back then right bayesian statistics and some other things
um very interesting libertarian coded thinker for sure right very interesting dude uh anyway um he
teamed up with these other guys who had read his paper and in 1994 created the foresight exchange
right which was basically the first iteration of the modern prediction market that we know
of now where basically you could uh bet on all sorts of ideas right essentially it's idea of
futures uh but it was play money right not real money um and after that um we basically you know
just in sort of writing the narrative there's a couple prediction markets that came up in the late
90s that we that we didn't include but are sort of referenced later in the page yeah and what was
trade sports that's it yeah because obviously sports betting and prediction markets since you
brought up the example of the world cup there's always kind of been a yeah a synergy there you know
well it's the most like straightforward like uh application of these things because sports betting
is is a million million multi-billion dollar industry it's really it's really huge and
who runs these casinos who's the casino yeah well what i was going to say about sports betting is
is that there's this really interesting book
that I leaned on a good amount
for parts of my book,
One Nation Under Blackmail,
by Dan Moldea,
that's basically about how organized crime
taking over the NFL.
Right, right.
To basically, because of sports betting.
Yeah.
So that nexus explored in One Nation Under Blackmail,
obviously in that book,
as it relates to Jeffrey Epstein,
it's basically about intelligence and organized crime.
Right.
They've been really big into sports for a long time,
so interesting.
And just casino stuff in general. I mean, that's what, that's one of the main ways that these guys, you know, I mean, you look at the power nexus that's in power right now. I mean, it's casino guys. It's, you know, Trump blew up.
Yeah, we have a lot to say about that later on, but that might be in the part two video.
Yeah, for sure. And then I think the other really big thing to talk about at the beginning of this sort of, you know, is the jurisdictional issues with using, you know, regulate highly regulated currency, right? Like there's a lot of a lot of the early digital currency stuff came out of like the poker community. I mean, the original Bitcoin client had a poker client, like remnants of it within the original code.
You know, you look at a Brock Pierce, like a Tether founder, and like they're doing all this digital good stuff and like video games.
But that whole nexus was all about kind of like getting money offshore via these instruments.
And prediction markets, you know, we'll get into a little bit here later.
But like they really don't work.
They weren't able to be popularized in the way polymarket is without cryptocurrency existing.
Yeah, well, get into that.
for a lot of reasons jurisdictional reasons legislation reasons and and also just like 24
7 internet you know markets so a lot of the stuff that these guys were doing early on they weren't
able to scale because they they had to be closed boxes because of the way the economics of it worked
and now with cryptocurrency you know it's a much yeah much so in keeping with the chronology here
though it's interesting you brought that up because the guy that co-founded the next one
that we talked about in the piece is max kaiser who's at the time i think he was at alex brown
and sons which is a bank that uh we'll have a piece on later this year about because of its
executives um who kaiser actually called out at one point but anyway he's best known as a bitcoin
evangelist or evangelist yeah an eccentric one at that but he created this thing called the hollywood
stock exchange with the next yeah with another wall street guy or then wall street guy michael
Burns who's now best known for like a leading role at Lionsgate Films and being a big film
executive. Yeah. But they created the Hollywood Stock Exchange which again was still play money
but it you know developed this huge following. People were crazy obsessed with it. Yeah. The
ones that were into it and people were paying real money for these fake portfolios on this
play money exchange. And they created they created you know the patents that basically
set up the digital security space.
You know, Kaiser is very, you know, and I kind of grew up on the Kaiser Report.
You know, I really enjoy his work with him and Stacey on that show.
I think they did really good journalism there.
But, you know, and part of his, you know, turning into being a journalist came from his
experience with the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
So he created like the virtual security specialist patent or something like that.
I apologize, Max, for getting that wrong.
and then pretty promptly got in a whole bunch of trouble
even though it was fake money,
there was a lot of jurisdictional issues,
legal issues with running the Hollywood Stock Exchange
and they ended up kind of tearing it apart,
breaking it down into pieces and the patents
and the majority of the users and everything that was on it
got shifted over to Cantor Fritz-Gerrold,
Our boy, our commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, the bag man for Tether, you know, his firm
ended up buying it in 2000 or 2001.
Yeah.
And I think it was like May of 2001.
I don't know.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
And then promptly moved all of the IP and everything into the big towers there in Manhattan,
or I should say that used to be there in Manhattan.
And then a few months later, obviously, the Cantor Fitzgerald office was blown up.
And with it, you know, any sort of further pushing of the Hollywood Stock Exchange, it kind of ended there at 9-11.
Yeah, we'll save the Cantor 9-11 story for another time.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
So, but anyway, basically what Lutnick wanted to do with this is he was like, great idea, but let's take away the play money and make it real money.
Right.
Right. Not to interrupt, but for, you know, Cantor is one of the 24 primary dealers of the New York Fed.
They're the largest bond treasury dealer in the United States and therefore in the world for treasury.
So him wanting to take this model and apply it with real money is a humongous deal just with who Cantor is.
Right. No, all good.
And can I just do my own sidebar and be like, we're one of the few outlets that's been covering Lutnik like a hawk.
like the end of 2023 before he was part of the trump campaign that's right yeah because there's
a lot of crazy stuff he's been involved with even recently that has not gotten a lot of attention
frankly i think we popularized the he's a he's epstein's neighbor i think we kind of we kind
of blew that up anyways not to well toot our own horns here but anyways have fun run with it just
a little toot toot but excuse me no it's all good so basically yeah letnik wanted to usher in this
era of a new type of commodity futures basically uh film futures and so obviously his plans were
kind of scuppered a little bit by 9 11 and then a few years later yeah thanks and then a few years
later um they relaunched um or attempted to relaunch but it was during the 2008 economic
crisis or rather in the aftermath of that and so you know congress was like not into it because
well presumably they were like our constituents will be mad if we approve this and so eventually
in some of the the laws that were passed in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis there was like a
lot of like prejudice text against cantor fitzgerald's right film future plans specifically
like they literally were like no film futures ever in it which is kind of funny but in in trying to
to get that to happen he hired lobbyists and some people and one of the guy he hired was this guy
uh rich jacobs oh yeah who now works for polymarket as like a top guy was hired like two years ago is
that a thing that happens that old guys like people that worked at in trade or whatever end up
advising like what's auger anyways we'll get into all that but uh yeah it seems to be kind of a
reoccurring thing where all of these early 90s like early technological iterations of this they
like bring all these guys back in and then they do all this stuff later it's so interesting it's
probably not a coin it is a coincidence i mean um anyways so yes hollywood stock exchange sort
of wraps that kind of thing yeah so anyway 2001 right is when uh where we were sort of a second
ago with 9-11 and yeah and hollywood stock exchange so yeah 9-11 scuppered may have scuppered
cantor's plans but it supercharged the plans of someone else uh to get into the prediction market
space which is the u.s military uh darpa what do you mean the u.s military took advantage of 9-11
to to to push initiatives that they had been planning for an extremely long time
i don't think that you're allowed to say that on youtube we'll find out we'll find out we'll be
We'll be right back.
Yeah so after 9 there was this push to basically do a bunch of insane things on the part of the national security state to prevent another 9 from ever happening again even though uh sorry youtube i gonna get that
little like thing under it about 9-11 and conspiracy theories um do it yeah the national
security state of the u.s uh at the very least helped 9-11 happen so then you know
uh sorry well yeah okay yeah well i i believe that and uh i think there's copious evidence for
that as opposed to osama bin laden with the 1980s cell phone do your own research
whoa you know we'll get it we'll get a mark on our account for another our first episode
three marks and you're out um yeah this is why real me is better than ai me because yeah i get
though under my under my videos no aiu is like total i don't know i don't want to watch it i
haven't seen it i just yeah yeah long story short 9-11 happened yes whatever happened happened but
it happened anyway the u.s national security state uh manufactured consent through 9-11
for all of the stuff they'd wanted to do before right and there's a litany of things that fall
in that category, one of which being the Department of Homeland Security, which they had introduced
legislation for in January, like February 2001. So there's all sorts of stuff in that category.
But after 9-11, there was something they wanted to do. Also, they justified after the attacks,
that was really the resurrection of something that was going on under Reagan in the 1980s,
or the Reagan Bush administration. And so it's no surprise then that someone that was a holdover
from that era at least rather the bush uh senior administration because it's reagan bush and then
bush senior right uh dick cheney who had been uh yeah oh my god uh defense secretary um under bush
senior obviously vice president under george w bush he's the one that pushed for this uh this guy
named john poindexter who had previously been the top official in the reagan administration indicted
for his role in iran contra um have and come lead this office uh at darpa a brand new office that
had actually been poindexter's idea right called the information awareness office that i've been
pretty much writing about for six years on and off um but what's interesting about this is that
a lot of the stuff that's in the information awareness office actually goes back to stuff that
Poindexter as basically being Oliver North's boss in Iran-Contra was helping facilitate.
And these are very controversial things from Iran-Contra that aren't talked about a lot
because it's misremembered, I would argue, as an arms for hostage scandal.
It's really much bigger than that in interfaces with a lot of other scandals of that era,
BCCI, among other things.
If you want to know all the details of that, you can read my books.
But basically one of the things that he wanted to do there and was overseeing with North was continuity of government protocols.
The goal of which was basically to label American citizens as dissidents and create sort of a way to deal with unrest or even massive nonviolent protests against U.S. military intervention abroad.
deal with all of these things by creating a list of Americans that could be, have their rights
suspended basically if the government wanted to. Wanted to. And so that is intimately related to
at least some of the projects that the Information Awareness Office later went on to pursue. So
you know, it seems pretty clear to me that Poindexter was brought in to resurrect that stuff
that had sort of been scandalous back in the 80s now that enough time had passed and people were
very stressed about national security after 9 11 now was the time uh and this isn't just like a
theory you have i mean this is stuff that like these guys are stating like overtly like whether
it's in the private sector or or like at the pentagon but you know like folks like larry ellison
who's in that middle ground of like he's technically private sector but like oracle started as project
oracle in the cia and he writes this big you know piece i feel like we brought this up a bunch of
times but wrote this big piece you know in the new york times about you know how like we need a
national database like like days after 9 11 for national security right well this national this
this database of everybody yeah so that's interesting you brought that up yeah so the the
big narrative from the people that were intimately involved in 9 11 like the cia and co was like after
9 11 they were like oh well the reason this happened is because not all of our databases
aren't really mush into one giant database yeah so the push for that has been going on data issue
so perfectly into it and used with prediction markets yeah and actually poindexter before
this push after 9 11 had been working for six years on this darpa program specifically about
how to manage data if it stopped being siloed data called genoa um yeah so anyway sounds like a nice
salami genoa okay keep going
now leaving it that's fine um remembering what i was talking about
yeah so this office he made and or that was made for him
courtesy of cheney the information awareness office
um creates all of these different uh programs one of which was genoa
with the goal of obtaining total information awareness,
which as the name sounds,
awareness of all information period.
So this was basically a huge dragnet surveillance program
that was going to suck up everything about every American
they could possibly obtain data wise.
And obviously this is in the early internet.
So they knew where the internet was going
because the internet was also out of DARPA
is basically a military project in its own right.
But basically scupper up all this,
you know, or hoover up all of this data on Americans
from, you know, not just your like finances,
but like what you're reading and consuming,
what food you're buying, what medication you're on.
I mean, pretty much everything you can think of
was supposed to go into this.
And it was the way they said they were going to stop
terrorist attacks from happening again was harvesting all of this data and then searching
for anomalies in that data and then going on to predict which is the key point here predict in the
context of polymarket predict what would happen before it happens so prevent terrorist attacks
before they happen and there was also a subsect there to prevent pandemics before they happen
and because they wanted to surveil the wastewater and the sewage which now they're doing they did
under Trump last time in 2020 under COVID. I have an article about that. But basically,
it was a huge insane dragnet and all of these different programs within it were meant to
interface together and then be sort of, the jewel on the crown was TIA, Total Information Awareness,
which was meant to plug into all of these different things and then assess the data and
decide who's a terrorist and who's not basically based on all of that data.
And so one of the programs within the Information Awareness Office was called FutureMap.
And within that, there was another program called the Policy Analysis Market.
Yes, or PAM.
P-A-M.
Sorry for all the acronyms, guys, but that's what happens when you talk about government stuff.
They're like very acronym happy.
Yes.
Yes. So then Pam was, they brought in none other than Robin Hanson, who we mentioned a bit ago, to be basically the system architect of that. And there was also another company involved in another iteration that were all the people from the University of Iowa. First prediction market, they were kind of involved too. And then in trade that you sort of brought up, they were consulting and advising. So this was more or less, more or less the people involved there.
And basically the policy analysis market originally was going to focus on more than just the Middle East, but because, you know, they were trying to get a lot of their data from the intelligence unit of The Economist, the paper, they found their services very costly.
And so instead of doing the entire world focus on eight countries in the Middle East, because, you know, 9-11, the war on terror, the focus was on the Middle East.
Iraq, Afghanistan.
And so, yes, and so they basically created, you know, an idea futures market about these countries, but it wasn't just, it was about all sorts of things, economic indicators, but also political ones, and then how those would combine.
So it was technically a combinatorial market, which Hansen had also done a lot of work on previously.
And so basically you have, you know, PAM attempting to launch and drumming up interest.
They originally wanted to have people from the CIA and intelligence community be the people participating in the market.
But they say they couldn't get enough interest.
Or rather that they couldn't have agencies compete at first because of issues with transferring money between federal intelligence agencies.
And then tried to do it all within one intelligence agency and couldn I guess didn find any interested players And so they went straight to the public and that various you know I guess insiders or experts were allowed to
participate. But it never actually launched, right? There was a big uproar about it because a couple
of senators found out and did a press conference. They branded it the terrorism futures market. And
And then after that, just infinite negative press.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine that, like, that just you're in the public and you don't know anything
about these things.
And then you see it's like, like, DARPA is doing a market where you can bet on the next
911.
I mean, that's basically what they said.
Yeah.
And also kind of basically what they were doing.
Yeah.
But the idea is, you know, hey, the markets are always perfect and always right.
The wisdom of the markets.
A way to harness the collective human, the wisdom of crowds.
Right.
Yes.
And I mean, there is something to that and collective humanity and whatever.
But I think in the hands of people like John Poindexter, a literal Iran Contra felon who
was like head of that chat or de facto head of that shadow government and like an insane
scandal that involved intelligence and organized crime and the same people that brought you
Jeffrey Epstein.
Right.
And this will be a huge part of part two.
And I'm sure I think at this point we'll do another part on part two because there's
a lot to talk about but this concept of like the markets can't be wrong and you know markets are
better you know than democracy and that's why we should use the information of markets and the
wisdom of crowds to like dictate policy it doesn't really make sense when you consider that like
every market in the world is like incredibly rigged and and controlled and so and who actually
gets and some of the people that are exactly that are big investors and yes so so that's a big that's
big issue with this whole concept this this isn't really about that concept we'll get into that in
part two but anyways yes you're right so in july 2003 uh you know the terrorist futures market idiom
gets gets thrown out there and these two centers they get it shut down and they end up shuttering
this this whole idea and all of these guys that you know maybe started in the private sector then
got sucked into the pentagon are now free to to go out into the private sector right so so we're at
this kind of point where like the information awareness office is couldn't be more scrutinized
by the public so but it's not like darpa and and the department of defense you know now department
of war was just like oh but these were bad ideas and let's not do them they're like no these are
great ideas and we want these ideas to happen and if a couple dingbat senators are going to blow this
up for us well we'll take it right out of the public sector and we'll toss it into the private
sector. I mean, more or less, that's what happened. Yeah. So a lot of my work the past few years in
talking about the Information Awareness Office has been about specifically how several programs
at that office were privatized. Right. Largely with the involvement of Peter Thiel, friend of the
show yeah um yeah and so he um so the first time i uh wrote about this was in 2020
uh when palantir got all the warp speed contracts and so you know basically what i was pointing out
there is uh how palantir is privatized total information awareness and it was designed to be
so yeah so when tia was under starting to become under scrutiny they went to congress and changed
the name to terrorism information awareness trying to be like oh we're not trying to spy
on all americans but yes we are yeah but it's terrorists yeah yeah you're all terrorists yeah
i mean it it was just a name change but the program was meant to be the same right um and
then and so congress you know because of the scrutiny and uh people the public backlash they
defunded information awareness but what actually happened is that they didn't actually end the
programs they were a lot of them were moved to different agencies in the national security
community um there was a provision for that actually in the legislation so thanks but no
thanks congress yeah um and uh you know basically total information awareness as soon as that name
change happened uh peter thiel comes yeah uh fresh off of selling paypal to pierre omidyar yeah and
he's got all this money and he's like i'm gonna make this company called palantir and palantir
as we've written about before as well uh had really started off as the anti-fraud algorithm
at paypal yeah uh named igor yeah and uh as we've talked about well i guess not on this show since
this is the first episode right but when paypal was being created uh max levchin sort of uh gave
it away yeah he did this interview with charlie rose uh you know actually around this time and
he said that hey when i was developing all the anti-fraud stuff at paypal you know i was working
with every three and four letter agency that i could meaning you know this is the cia and the dod
and and darpa and and whatever and uh you know they were some of the most fruitful business
relationships i ever had um yada yada so they form paypal in the late 90s they're the first company
to go public after 9 11 you know in the dot-com boom and then they make a bunch of money and it's
teal and levchin admittedly working with the cia and nsa you know while developing these anti-fraud
stuff they create igor which is named after this russian fraudster who was just toying with them
and they figured out a way to defeat this this guy and then they take that algorithm and teal who is
you know buddies buddies with poindexter uh and you know ends up you know kind of being advised by him
and he takes that anti-fraud algorithm which was built with the cia in the private sector
and then rebrands it as palantir i i mean so so this is getting shut down in july 2003
and palantir is coming out i mean literally the exact same time right well i think they were
incorporated even earlier right it was around the name change but basically you know as they're
setting it up they they go through richard pearl who was involved with the bush era department of
of Defense and I believe the Office of Special Plans.
Okay.
And he was basically this arc neocon that has this long history.
Arc neocon.
He is, though.
I mean, he's like one of the key neoconservative guys.
I mean, he was also, you know, in talking about bridging like U.S.-Israeli national security
interests, like back in the 80s.
Right.
And there's all this very controversial history.
Yeah.
Basically being a, you know, more or less a spy for Israel in Congress when he's an aide
to one of the main early neocon congressmen or senators.
I forget which one he was.
But Pearl is in the office or involved with the Department of Defense.
And he's approached by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp.
And they're basically like, we want to talk to John Poindexter
because what he was trying to do is what we want to do.
I mean, and this is admitted in mainstream media.
So please don't tell me this is a conspiracy theory.
This is literally what they plan to do.
And then they go and meet with Poindexter, who becomes named basically the godfather of modern surveillance because of this.
Right.
And advises them on how to create Palantir.
And then Palantir gets in bed pretty much right away with the CIA.
Yeah, first client.
In Qtel.
Right.
And they, I mean, Karp has admitted that the CIA was always the intended client of Palantir.
They were their first and only client for like their first six years as a company.
There's also this amazing ask me anything on Reddit where Peter Thiel gets asked,
is Palantir a front for the CIA?
And he responds, no, the CIA is a front for Palantir.
Now, obviously, he's being a little cheeky, but is he?
Is he being that cheeky?
As we've now seen, you know, since obviously he was onto something there.
Another point that I wanted to mention,
Poindexter is coming from this lineage of like you Navy intelligence where it seems like there's this nexus of a lot of these guys
whether it's L. Ron Hubbard or
You know, maybe even some people related to Sean Parker, which we'll get into here in a little bit
But anyways TIA basically is the privatization or rather Palantir is the privatization of TIA
Teal is the no pun intended the point man alongside point Dexter for that and then
what does he immediately get involved with after that? Yeah, so in 2004, there's
another LifeLog program that gets, or sorry, LifeLog program. LifeLog is a DARPA
program that gets shuttered in the wake of the TIA explosion. It shuts down the
same day that Facebook is launched and the project manager of LifeLog, Douglas
Gage, later on was like, Facebook is exactly what I wanted LifeLog to end up
becoming interesting that and then Peter Thiel fresh off of privatizing total
information awareness and there's some detail we didn't get into there like the
involvement of Alan Wade and how that ties in with all this other stuff and
how the CIA had intimately been involved with TIA yeah and and that's why you
have the CIA and Palantir coming together so early blah blah anyway so
read the article yeah it's all in there totally so LifeLog was basically a way to
to create the goal was to create basically a narration of a person's life and episodes basically
a surveillance log of everything you've ever done in discrete episodes that are tied to like
geolocation like where you are and who you're with yeah with photographic evidence and like
all of this other stuff so like I mean it's literally is Facebook and
But how did that come to be? Well, you know, obviously when Facebook was first launched,
it was, you know, amorphous and there was no, it could have become anything, right? But it was
shaped into this because the people that first really funded it are the PayPal mafia. It was
Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. Yeah. And then alongside guys like Ron Conway. Who come from
the Parker Nexus. And obviously Sean Parker's important to the Polymarket story because
Shane Copeland has gone on and on about the Napsterization of finance and that that's what
he is doing. And he gave talks about that at his company before Polymarket and of course after the
fact at Polymarket as well. And, you know, Sean Parker before Facebook and being his first president
created Napster. So I'll let you do a little. Yeah. So Sean Parker, he co-founded Napster
actually with another Sean, Sean Fanning. Interestingly, you know, he just kind of hit
him up, sent him an email and was like, Hey, I, you know, we met on IRC.
What you're doing is really cool.
I want to come out to San Francisco and come check it out and, and, and do that.
But, but you know, long before that fateful email and that IRC meetings, when he was 15
and 16 years old, he was accused.
Um, I don't think he was like formally charged or anything cause he was a minor, but he was
like a, you know, a hacker and he hacked into like a fortune 500 company and, and, you know,
potentially reportedly some military websites and government websites. And he ended up getting,
you know, his like house, you know, quote unquote, raided by the FBI because he had broken into,
you know, some things that he wasn't supposed to. And, you know, at that time, you know,
you know, he became, you know, it's quite an interesting recruitment tool for intelligence
when you are like a hacker. It's a very like rare skill. And we've talked about this before,
but the fact that you know the fbi raids his house and you know as he has admitted uh the cia came
and tried to recruit him um you know at a very young age because of because of this this skill
and interestingly he says that he denied going to the cia which is very possible but much like
levchin levchin great went to the cia or the nsa actually uh upon graduation from a computer
science degree from the university of illinois and he went to the nsa and he said hey you know
ussr fell i came to america i found amazing opportunity here i love america i want to become
an american citizen and i want to use cryptography for the betterment of the nation and then nsa was
like you'll never make a dime doing it that way uh you know you should stay in the private sector
if you want to make any money off of this stuff and then immediately he like flies out crashes
at scott banister's house who's you know becomes the first board member of paypal he's the vp of
idea labs which is the first founder of paypal and uh meets peter teal like institutional investor
yeah teal is the first investor but when you're like a co-founder it's not really like investing
it's like you're just like yeah i know but idea labs is the first investor of paypal other than
peter teal putting in money for them to start the company and um uh you know just crashing on
on Bannister's couch, meets Teal at Stanford, you know, comes up with some ideas. They start PayPal.
Everything that we just said happens right after that. So he literally goes to the NSA, says,
I want to work for you. And they go, no, go to the private sector. He digitizes money.
Go to Scott Bannister's house and then meet Peter Teal instead, Maxie.
So, you know, kind of a similar thing happened with our boy, Sean Parker. He gets arrested,
or rather gets, you know, raided. The FBI sends him to do this long community service thing. And
uh you know ends up meeting a bunch of people including this girlfriend he loses his virginity
he claims because the fbi raided his house which is kind of interesting you know maybe they're
sending him a handler or something who knows i i have no evidence of that but regardless
cia recruits him for hacking after the fbi raids him he says no and he goes he's in the dc area he
was he was born in fairfax county where like langley is and the cia is and all this stuff in dc
because his dad was this longtime government oceanographer who had done all this work for
decades with, you know, basically U.S. intelligence gathering information, whether it's climate change
or whatever, but oceanography and work directly with the Navy and all that. But so he gets
recruited by the CIA. He says no. And he goes and joins Freeloader, which is a company by Marcus
Pincus who ends up becoming you know extremely famous for I mean just being a big part of Facebook in general and later is involved with
Coplin and Polly market which is why we talked about this
But you know he he co-found Zynga which is a huge part of why Facebook becomes what it is
And ends up being I think at one point it's like 10 to 15 percent of all the revenue of Facebook is from Zynga
You know, he's a huge part of the Facebook Nexus
And and so he goes to freeloader and then he goes to unit
which is the DC-based ISP, the first commercial ISP internet service provider that basically took
all of these ex-DARPA officials and ex-government officials and privatized, you know, a lot of the
technology, commercialized a lot of the technology that was developed at DARPA. Interestingly, the
money man behind UNet, Mitch Kapoor, was one of the main guys at Lotus, the co-founder of Lotus.
Lotus, of course, very famously, he was replaced by Jim Manzi, who features prominently in the
Chain series as being a board member of Ghislaine Maxwell's husband's cargo metrics and also of
Paxos, very interesting. And then Bill Gross, who kind of came into this nexus through UNet,
and he is the founder of Idealabs who ends up being the guy that sort of funds Musk and Teal
and all of these guys very early on.
He's the incubator that really takes the privatization of these DARPA projects and blows them up.
So very importantly, Parker is already in this nexus, the Pinkus nexus, the DC, UNet,
gross, Lotus, Mancy nexus.
So very interestingly, Parker is at a very, very, very early age is involved with intelligence
and DC-based privatization of DARPA projects, like before even Napster.
And then he sends an email to Sean Fanning, moves out to San Francisco, co-founds Napster,
and then, of course, ends up becoming this huge mythic internet figure because of what
Napster did, of breaking down all these barriers of peer-to-peer data sharing, and then what
happened with the litigation from the music industry against Napster.
Right. And so basically in doing that, he develops this Napsterization model.
This model. Exactly. Which is used by the Tealverse, the network around Peter Thiel,
just numerous times. And then obviously when Sean Parker, after Facebook goes to work for Peter Thiel
at Founders Fund, they do it there together. But there's a lot of these companies that literally do
that and so it's basically the analogy is Napster and Spotify and that's how
Napsterization works. Yeah so more or less the Napsterization model is
create a disruptive technology which Napster was a peer-to-peer technology of
sending and also a compression algorithm for mp3s. You know you can't have the
peer-to-peer without the compression algorithm otherwise there's these huge
files and they basically create this amazing community of people sharing all of this data
that's completely illegal because a lot of it is copyrighted data but they create this whole
infrastructure and they don't give a and then of course they get sued into oblivion and the company
you know it still exists in some form but you know it's not it's like a legal version of it
now someone bought the brand because it was a big brand but basically naps are disrupted everything
killed the music industry as as it stands now moved everything towards mp3s and streaming
And then years later, after, you know, his joining Facebook was very similar too.
He saw the Facebook.com on like his roommate girlfriend's computer and sent an email to Zuckerberg and was like,
holy shit, this is awesome.
Just like he did with Sean Fanny.
Yeah, and then Zuckerberg's like, come meet me.
And then like, come here.
And then he moves in and then he becomes the first president of Facebook.
Yeah.
Facebook also had a lot of Napsterization issues.
Like there was a lot of questionable legal stuff at the beginning.
um but regardless um napster obviously implodes but then you know years later sean parker becomes
a billionaire from facebook he joins founder's fund i think in 06 and one of the first things
he does is he invests a ton of money into spotify becomes one of their main advisors and now spotify
is the ubiquitous it's taken over itunes it's the descendant of napster right yeah but napster
failed so spotify could succeed exactly the idea is create a disruptive company that is just an experiment Yeah Basically you know it will fail but it changes the definition in people minds of what is
normal or what is acceptable and pushes the envelope with regulation.
Yeah.
And then at a later date, they come.
And?
And now that that disruption is done, they come and they install the company or create
or find the company they want to use as a vehicle for that.
and then they create, as Peter Thiel loves to, monopolies, basically.
And that was, I was going to say, all of these models, they start as a free thing,
and then they turn into, you know, Spotify obviously is a paid service.
So that's another big part of the model is you disrupt, destroy the market,
and then create a paid version of it that is very convenient and legal and all this,
and then everyone throws the money there.
Yeah, so keep that model in mind because Shane Copeland's whole thing,
or I'm calling him Copeland, Copeland, I don't know.
His whole thing is the Napsterization of finance and how Polymarket is doing that.
So we're not just bringing all this stuff up because we're crazy and we're conspiracy theorists and all this stuff.
We're bringing it up because Shane himself says that he is obsessed with the lives of Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick, who's the Uber founder.
And he starts out his career basically as an intern at Genius Lyrics.
Yeah, or Rap Genius is how it started.
Yeah, he started interning there. So like basically early background on Copeland, Copeland,
whatever. He like felt like he was going to be always out competed by his peers. And he basically
was like, what he's told in profiles on him since obviously, is that I needed to find a different
way to compete. And he basically does that by becoming obsessed with Mark Zuckerberg and Travis
Kalanick in particular, and probably other big tech billionaire founders who he doesn't name,
but those are the two he names. Of course. And that's pretty significant. So at Rap Genius,
it was a the goal was to basically i guess annotate the web which is interesting because
that was actually what the first search engine that the maxwell sisters glane sisters created
uh was also about annotating the whole web interesting but basically rap genius the goal
was to do that but first it launched via you know hip-hop right and gained sort of public uh notoriety
in uh in fame that way um but he became the top editors as an intern for the entries of the big
tech founders like kalanick and like zuckerberg and this was a y combinator company correct yeah
it was a y combinator company which is the you know i guess san francisco base san francisco
yeah it's it's one of the most well-known startup incubators it's very closely connected to teal
at least now it's like a new idea labs but like quicker yeah but they got they got involved with
20 uh uh with y combinator in 2011 which is when conway who you mentioned right um also became
involved there and then sam altman who's a you know at this point widely recognized as a tl protege
becomes a partner there and then a few years later he ends up taking over y combinator yeah
so he's obsessed with these guys he runs into rap rap genius is like let me work for you and then
they're like wow you know so much about all these guys you're so cool and then he you know works for
them or whatever as an intern and then he i believe at that time in 2014 you know he got into the eth
ICO the Ethereum initial point offering and made a bunch of money on ETH and ended up going to San Francisco
To intern at this another another startup that was like an ETH based startup
Incubator called Chronicle that was San Francisco based that they ended up doing some weird like
medical
Chain and medilayer and some other things. But anyways, he like interns over there and then pretty much right after that
that, you know, drops out of college, makes a bunch of money.
He goes back to New York to go to college and drops out quickly.
Yeah, because he's making millions of dollars in ETH.
And he's like, why am I doing this?
Like, this is where I need to be.
And ends up founding his first company.
Which is called Token Bank at the time.
But it later becomes Token Union.
And he bills it as Ethereum's first savings account, basically.
So the idea of it is, you know, you hold a bunch of these tokens, right?
So ETH is famous for being able to create, you know, it's easy to make tokens.
There's this standard on it called ERC-20s, and you can create these tokens.
And his model was, if you hold a bunch of these tokens, we'll give you a yield and we'll pay you, you know, a percentage to hold a bunch of these tokens.
And in that, you know, trying to build that savings mechanism,
he ends up partnering with this group that had kind of done a lot of the work before for creating like yield-based stuff.
Again, this is before Ethereum is a yield-based proof-of-stake model, which is Bancor, which
is, you already mentioned kind of this.
Right.
Co-founded by Netanyahu's niece and nephew.
And interestingly, right before creating Bancor, the niece that the co-founder, Galia Benartzi,
she worked for Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.
Oh.
Recurring theme Founders Fund here.
Wow.
Okay.
Leading all of their Israeli-focused investments.
Right.
And speaking of Israeli focused investments a couple other investors and again this token union token bank token market these
These are you know, these are hidden from the story the story is that polymarket, you know was created in his bathroom
Well, you know all by himself and and the reality is that you know
No, there was a predecessor company one of the actually the the guys that used to work for this company
Who was a programmer there even says that it's the predecessor to Paul. Yeah
He said Polymarket used to be known as Token Bank.
Right.
And a lot of these URLs redirect to Polymarket now, which is really interesting.
Yeah, because it was like tokenunion.io and then it became union.market, which Copland
says was not related at all to the previous company.
He doesn't even ever acknowledge the company's existence, really.
He claims it was because of some place he liked to buy like mushroom brioche buns out
or something.
Yeah.
But I mean, there's a pretty clear evolution of that.
Right.
And then anyway, it was union.market, then poly.market, and now polymarket.com.
Right.
And so one of the other Israeli tide investors, Lou Kerner, founded this group called Crypto
Oracle.
Which is seemingly invested in token bank or token union because they had some private
presale that where they netted, I think, a million or over a million dollars.
Yeah.
So obviously he had some connections to be able to do that.
And that guy was a former Idea Labs who helped run Dot TV in the late 90s.
And also has all these ties to Israeli tech.
Yeah, intimately involved in the Israeli venture scene.
Very inspired by the Startup Nation book written by Dan Sinor,
who is a neocon formerly with Foreign Policy Initiative,
which is what PNAC, if you're familiar with PNAC,
morphed into was Foreign Policy Initiative.
And basically their argument is that Israel's startup scene is so great is because basically of civil military fusion, which is, you know, de facto fascism, basically.
And then other advisors, we had Steven Naryoff, who was considered the co-creator of the legal architect of the Ethereum ICO.
And then we had James Haft, who was an NXTP Ventures guy, who is intimately connected with Diego Gutierrez.
Gutierrez, who also later becomes an advisor to Token Union.
Right, and we had written about these guys from Debt From Above.
Two years ago.
Sadologic play.
So check out that stuff.
rootstock is all is all in there so anyway he starts this there's a he raised millions of
dollars he has all these advisors that are kind of kicking butt um but sort of white you know just
minimizes that this ever happened um and then the the story goes that he founded polymarket in june
2020 yeah but of course just not like there's so much missing in this story even even with us
putting in the token the token bank stuff and the main story that's missing is our boy joey krug
who ends up becoming, again, works at Founders Fund and joins Peter Thiel
and works closely with Sean Parker doing all this stuff later.
Becomes bigger on Polymarket.
Becomes one of the main CDA investors in Polymarket with Founders Fund.
But what he's really famous for, similar kind of story where he's this young guy.
He's mining Bitcoin when he's 15 years old in his room.
He loves horse gambling.
Loves horse gambling.
Yes.
There's some great pictures of him with horses.
It's very funny.
He's also an ETH ICO guy.
And so he founded Augur in 2014, Augur, A-U-G-U-R, which is another, it's like a Grecian seer.
A Roman seer.
And it sort of based on these prediction markets cryptocurrency prediction markets based on this paper that was written by Paul Stortz in 2013 December 2013 called truth coin Yeah but also not just inspired by that but also inspired by a
2013 Robin Hanson paper that shun that Shane Copeland also later says inspired him right for poly market and
Just to tie all of what we've discussed together into this before you go deeper into author
Aughar, foundational and inspirational to Aughar was DARPA's policy analysis market or PAM.
So much so that when they created Aughar they were like, what should our logo be?
And it's literally the same logo as the information awareness office, the one eye pyramid.
And then was there an important guy that worked at PAM that then helped advise Aughar?
Yes, Robin Hanson himself.
Oh, Robin Hanson himself.
Oh, interesting.
And were there other interesting advisors to Augur that might be relevant to this story?
That were also involved with Pam?
Yes, Mark.
Oh, wow.
The in-trade guy.
Oh, wow.
That's right.
And then also an advisor to Augur and the first investor or the first couple investors
was Vitalik Buterin, right?
And he was the guy that created Ethereum and-
And had been a Teal Fellow.
He created Ethereum as a Teal Fellow, right?
And so then he's investing, you know, he comes to Joey Krug who's working on this stuff.
Augur initially was going to be probably Bitcoin based and Vitalik's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Don't do it like that.
What do you want to do?
You want these nice and more contracts, more expressive.
Come over here to ETH.
I'm building ETH.
It's going to be great.
So before ETH is even out, he's like, come to ETH.
He's on a Teal Fellowship from, I think it was 2013 to build Ethereum, which launches in 2014.
and then Krug is working on Augur in 2014.
He switches over to ETH because this Teal fellow is like,
come over here.
Krug then gets a Teal Fellowship in 2016 to develop Augur,
which is interesting.
And at the time, he co-founded Augur with a data scientist
from Berkeley and then with another young kid,
Jeremy Gardner, who ends up becoming a partner
at Blockchain Capital, which is heavily featured in the Chain series, co-founded by Tether,
co-founder Brock Pierce. But while they're doing this, he's arguing online and he literally says,
you know, I can publicly say that the CIA, DARPA, and the DoD are huge fans of Augur,
which is, you know, just great cue pull quite a part out loud there. So the Teal Nexus is in there,
The Ethereum nexus is in there.
Augur ends up becoming the first ICO.
ICO being initial coin offering.
It's analogous to the IPO, initial public offering, which is sort of how a company goes
public.
And they recreated this model, a fundraising model, public fundraising model, but for crypto
tokens.
And so Augur is actually the first one on ETH, which is a huge deal.
And so REP is their token, the R-E-P, which obviously is used in the Augur back end as
a way, at least in the first edition of it, as a way to use these prediction based markets
using cryptocurrency.
And Krug speaks a lot to this.
So the first edition, first version of Augur is super clunky, it kind of stinks, but they
raised millions and millions and millions of dollars with this REP token.
And first iteration, which I believe launched in 2018, was really crappy and it was hard
to use.
Maybe intentionally crappy.
Maybe intentionally, but interestingly, right before it launches, but after the ICO, so they
make tons and tons and tons of money.
Joey Krug joins Pantera, which was founded by Dan Moorhead.
It's one of these like Tiger Cub DC firms.
He joins it in 2017 as co-chief investment officer.
He writes this big blog post about why he's joining and how he's like, this isn't going
to hurt Augur.
It's good for Augur.
In fact, we're going to be trading on it.
And we're not doing it as charity.
We're doing it to make a lot of money.
And actually, we're on there to make a lot of money.
It's not charity.
And we have an edge in this market, much like we have an edge in the Bitcoin market.
And that's why we're doing this.
So already from the get-go, huge VC firms, some of the most important ones are involved.
They're trading on these platforms before they're even really viable products that people
can use.
And they're admitting they have an edge and they're making a bunch of money on it and
they're doing it to make money on it.
So this is all happening before version two even launches, which if I recall, version two
was 2020 and version two launches with now it has stable coin access.
So one of the issues with the first version of Augur is it uses Ethereum and this REP
token, which have really crazy volatile price swings because it's just the price of these
tokens.
a bet, you're actually unfortunately exposed not only to the bet outcome, but to the volatility
of the underlying token.
So by switching it to DAI, which is the stable coin from MakerDAO heavily worked on by Nikolai
Michelin, who we've written about in the chain series.
I wrote about it in my book, The Bitcoin Dollar.
Probably murdered by the CIA.
Very likely murdered by the CIA.
But regardless, 2020, they launched with DAI and the stablecoins sort of eliminate a lot
of these issues.
Prediction markets could not exist without cryptocurrency for many reasons, but one of
them being that there's a legislative issue and a fraud issue.
Legislation being, you know, it's illegal.
There was the Internet Act, the Internet Protection Gambling, Internet Protection Act or something
like that, where they basically made it illegal for people to process money for offshore gambling.
And so they had to figure out a way to get around this.
And this was a big issue that a lot of these early ones like in trade dealt with.
And so one of the ways they get around it is you use cryptocurrency.
It's a great workaround.
You don't have to use credit cards.
You don't have to do these things.
And then also because you're not using credit cards and because cryptocurrency transactions
are functionally almost definitely irreversible.
Obviously, you know, there's the infamous call Joe Lubin line from Howard Lutnick saying
if you want something frozen on Ethereum, call Joe Lubin.
But it's a lot harder to reverse the transaction.
So if these guys are making bets on Polymarket or on Augur in this case using DAI, it's really
hard to reverse the transactions if a bet maker tries to do some fraud.
Whereas if it was a credit card, they could call and say, I didn't place this bet and
the credit card company will take the money back.
You can't really do that with Augur.
So Augur does DAI in 2020 and then Augur Turbo comes out in 2021, notably after Polymarket's
founded in 2020 and as a way to solve a lot of these clunky issues of how slow
the platform is and all that they integrate Chainlink as the Oracle
provider who actually determines the outcome and then they use an Ethereum
layer to Polygon interestingly both of those are what Polymarket uses yeah
which is kind of interesting so at this time he's at Pantera there there he's
trading on auger then they upgrade it then they upgrade it again now it's
basically what Polymarket is today.
Yeah, but like who, why did this new version of Augur, even though it was so much better
and they like fixed their previous problems, why did it fail?
Well, they sort of broke it all down and they pieced it, you know, broke down the assets
and they sold it off actually to Coinbase who then admittedly didn't have a, you know,
because they had created the Forecast Foundation, which was the nonprofit behind Augur.
And then they created like a VC firm on it and augmented partners, I believe is what it
was called.
And then they created a DEX using the OX model, which had all these investors, you know, all
these similar, Reid Hoffman and Andreessen and all these guys were involved in this.
And then they sold it off to Coinbase.
And admittedly in this interview that we link in the article, they say that Coinbase didn't
have a plan for it beyond two months.
And they just brought it there to take all the patents and the technology, which was licensed
from Intrade. Augur got a bunch of, they gave a bunch of rep tokens to Intrade, which then
traded all those for ETH. And now Intrade has this huge, huge, huge, huge ETH stash,
very interestingly from the ICO. But anyways, and now the guys just like retired, soft retired
because they made millions of dollars, but they purposely shipped it off and sunset it,
sold the assets off to Coinbase, and then basically relaunched this all with Polymarket
using USDC and Chainlink and Polygon.
All right.
So let's go back to the founding of Polymarket, right?
So the official narrative that we've already discussed as being bunk is that Mr. Shane
is, you know, oh, COVID's happening.
It's lockdowns.
There's so much uncertainty.
It the best time for prediction markets And I just so passionate about prediction markets I going to it into existence by by being in my bathroom all alone in my bathroom
and just coating oh I mean my bathroom I don't know why he said that's the
narrative they like yeah I sell so bad because it's like the bathroom because
It literally stinks.
Well, it used to be like the garage, right?
We built this company in our garage and now they've gone to like, well, we can't do the garage anymore.
Now it's the bathroom.
Yeah.
I don't know. It's just so weird.
Anyway, so obviously we know that he had all these connections, particularly the people that sort of bridge the U.S. Israeli crypto tech scene.
scene and basically had remolded or was working in the process of going from
token union which kind of became irrelevant when Ethereum was moving to
proof of stake they didn't really need what the service...
The Ethereum proof of stake like debugging in the code was done with
Antithesis which is a DC based Palantir subcontractor that was in stealth the whole time.
some more teal connections there.
The chain. The chain. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so basically he has all these connections anyway when he is creating it.
And we didn't put this in part one, it'll be in part two, but there's an interview that he gave in 2020
where he said a lot of the passion for the creation of Polymarket from him and his team was DARPA's policy analysis market.
market. And even though he's alone in his bathroom building this company ostensibly with no connections,
as he says, he somehow raises four million dollars just three months after the company launches.
And the main people backing him are Coinbase's earliest employees. So remember, Coinbase takes
Ogre and sunsets it. So these people that, you know, they left Coinbase, but they were still
connected to it.
So one example is one confirmation which is created by one of Coinbase's earliest employees,
Nick Tomano.
And he right away invests in ETH and also invests in Coinbase right back in the company
he left and then dumps money into Polymarket.
And interestingly, Polymarket uses USDC.
50% of all profits from USDC's issuer circle goes to Coinbase because they're like the main investor.
Yeah, so it's like another...
And then another like Coinbase's literal earliest employee like Olaf Carlson,
he also is like the main other main investor in there. So like the Coinbase bros.
Yeah, and there's another Coinbase guy that's there also in 2020 in the seed round.
So like all these Coinbase guys got in really early with Shane and Polymarket.
yeah and four million dollars and then you know Coinbase on the other side sort
of sunsets their competitor for them and by that time Joey Krug had left right
and where did he go in founders fund founders fund and then they end up leading one of the series rounds for Polymarket pretty early on wow yeah so yeah there was that whole thing where he was like you know they were messaging each other because
Copeland was like, I don't like Augur and there's a lot of issues with it, but I have
all these other ideas.
Polymer's going to be better.
And Krug's like, listen, I'm a big investor guy now.
I don't really do Augur anymore.
I'm like an advisor for things like Ampleforth and whatever.
If you make $5 million a month in volume, hit me up and then I'll invest.
Sure as shit, they hit the $5 million a month.
Krug joined Founders Fund in 2023.
He leads the Series A.
yeah so basically since we're kind of running out of time here it's
Augur was an attempt to resurrect Pam it failed but true to the Napsterization
model right we have Augur being the predecessor the poly market just like
Napster was to Spotify and literally they have said this yeah Krug has said this
Yes, Colbyn has said this.
Yes, they have said this.
I mean, it's important to note here, and I think the last point I want to end with here
is about what the significance of this is.
And a lot of that, Part 2 is going to be sort of necessary to unpack in its entirety, this
idea.
But what was PAM?
PAM was part, or the policy analysis market, but these guys have been trying to resurrect.
It was part of TIA.
And TIA, Total Information Awareness, the goal was not just to see everything going on
in the present and find anomalies, find the bad guys in a sea of data, of everyone's data
in mass surveillance.
It was to predict.
It was pre-crime.
It was predictive policing on a massive scale and in pretty much every ambit of human life
you can think of.
And so polymarket, because the market knows all of these polymarket odds, just like with
Pam, the odds are there to help feed the pre-crime engine.
This is what will happen.
Right.
Or this will not.
And we know that polymarket bets can be rigged and that polymarket itself puts out misinformation
sometimes to make trades swing one way or the other and that insider trading is a huge
problem.
And the context of that, as it's meant to interface with what is now Palantir, is really
unsettling.
And lo and behold, if you look it up, dude, it's there.
Polymarket and Palantir are partners.
They are partnered and they work together for the market integrity.
So this has already happened.
And this is the privatized Panopticon.
Yes.
And not only privatized, they're going to commercialize it.
They're making money on it.
Insider trading is not a problem.
It's a feature.
It's a feature, not a bug.
Hanson says that, but these guys also say it too.
And we'll explore more.
So part two, of course, we will discuss a lot of these initial founding principles and philosophies that led to let's build out all this tech.
Let's build out cryptocurrency, which probably came from the Tealverse anyway.
Then let's get ETH so we can make tokens.
Then we can create smart contracts.
Then we can create prediction markets with irreversible transactions.
And then we'll make stable coins, which is the same nexus.
Bill Gross and Epstein were talking about having Tether being founded.
and you know all of these mechanisms that were necessary to create today's
Pauline market came out of this nexus of we're going to create a new form of
governance based on prediction market yeah which is future arcy the idea of a
new governance form exactly and the applications of that and its
interactions with neo reactionary thought and that influence in the current
Trump administration yes this is very important stuff and there's actually been
efforts by the current Trump administration where they've already
been implementing these ideas and it's probably only going to get crazier from
here on out because of course the Trump family personally involved,
Polymarket and Calci its main competitor. All of this and more coming to you in
both a part two article and I'm sure we'll have to do another rip on this.
Oh totally. There's a lot of detail and we just tried to give an overview but
basically it's taken them 25 years to get to this point. They're not giving up now.
No, they're not giving up now, but a lot of their success of what is a very dystopian plan for governance and mass surveillance
hinges on people buying the official narratives of what these companies are.
100%
So it's more important than ever to
Scrutinize and break apart those narratives when they are not true. Yes case in point. So that's what we're doing at 11 Unlimited Hangout. Yeah
And so yeah, this is our first episode. Yeah
we would like to hear what you thought about it yeah we can you know improve
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yeah thanks for hanging out on our first episode thanks for having me with me
yeah of course I have a feeling I'll see you again on our next episode and
thanks to everyone for watching. We really appreciate you stopping by and yeah.
See you then.
I'm going to pay you out on video. Yay!
you