The sicko who invented prediction markets

Where did prediction markets come from, and why are they more popular than ever? Charlie Warzel joins the pod once again to discuss the proliferation of these strange companies like Kalshi and Polymarket that allow you to bet on nearly anything — monetizing the good, and mostly bad things. We go into the early 2000s background of these platforms, led by Robin Hanson, an economist and self-described “Jungian ENTP” who originally got involved with prediction markets through his “Policy Analysis Market” as a means to anticipate political instability and terrorist attacks; how they are used now; and whether we’re headed into Hanson’s desired “futarchy.” Our guest Charlie Warzel writes the Galaxy Brain newsletter and podcast. Subscribe to the newsletter here and check out the podcast here or wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  Charlie, to start things off, where are you doing your insider trading right now? Is it Kalshi? Are you a polymarket? Do you like the cryptocurrency aspects of polymarket? Or you want to insider trade with cash?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm fully decentralized, so.

• 0:13Ryan Broderick?

  So it's polymarket?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, polymarket with a couple of offshore accounts linked to it.

• 0:18Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. You can read more about that in my Discord. It's like $299 a month to subscribe, but you get a lot of alpha out of it.

• 0:27Ryan Broderick?

  That makes sense because I'm one of the Clippers in your Discord for your show. And you're always paying us in like Doge or like Tether recently. It seemed like maybe something's wrong. I don't know, but.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Some Solana.

• 0:41Ryan Broderick?

  Solana, yeah.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:59Ryan Broderick?

  Welcome back to the show, Charlie.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:01Ryan Broderick?

  When was the last time you were on the show? I think you're in the three timer club now.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, I think now, I think one more and I'm officially the host of the show.

• 1:10Ryan Broderick?

  You can have.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Leaving you of duties, which is pretty sweet. I don't know. I think, was it last time, January 6th? Or?

• 1:17Ryan Broderick?

  No, last time was Dave Portnoy.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Right, Dave Portnoy.

• 1:22Ryan Broderick?

  I forgot we even did an episode.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  President-elect.

• 1:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, Swamp Scut's finest. Today, we're talking about a different kind of sicko. But first, let me intro the show properly. My name is Ryan Broderick. With me as always is Grant Irving. And this is Panic, Roll the Show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And joining us, I guess you are actually the second person to become a three timer. So you're not the first.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Who's the other?

• 1:47Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know. But that's in my notes for the show today.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  It's Claude.

• 1:52Ryan Broderick?

  Who is the first three timer, Grant?

• 1:54Speaker 02

  It's Juniper.

• 1:55Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, Juniper. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Okay, well, that's fine.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  I could have phrased it nicer, but I didn't want Charlie to like leave here gloating, you know?

• 2:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, no, Juniper, the much better guest. Yes. She is the first three timer. But Charlie Wadsworth, welcome. How are you?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm good. I'm good. I'm ready. I'm ready to try to figure out how to quit my day job and really make some money.

• 2:18Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's time. I think journalism can only go so far into reflecting reality. And actually, you should just fully go into the market. I think the market is really the only way to report on what's happening.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  I agree. You know, we're utilizing the comments to get to a better understanding of truth. So I think that's what this is all about.

• 2:38Ryan Broderick?

  In all seriousness, have you used one of these platforms, CalShe, Polymarket, some other weird one? Have you used any of them before?

• 2:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I did to sort of figure out what's up with it. So I made like a couple of like really stupid bets on golf stuff on CalShe and just to sort of see. I'm not a big better. I like to win things and I find it's just a great way to lose money. I don't know. I don't have a lot of money to begin with, so I'm trying not to like flush it down the toilet and like let these very strange companies take, you know, 10, 15, 20%.

• 3:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I I've said this before. I don't have the gambling brain shape. It just like doesn't work with me very well. I have used like crypto style wallets and stuff and I've messed around with them. And I've, and I've met a lot of people, you know, over the last few years at crypto events who are building what, you know, basically all got replaced by Polymarket. So like I was sort of, I sort of knew the prediction market stuff was coming as of like two or, you know, three or four years ago, but I have never actually met anyone that's using them either and openly talking about it, which I also think is interesting.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  I will say the one thing I do like to do is go into the comments, like find a good market and then go into the comments and especially a good market that has just resolved. And look at the different people because every single time you go in, there are a number of people who are like, wait, that's what we were betting on? Like, are you serious? And it's like, I just lost a thousand dollars. I had no idea that's what it meant when we were resolving to yes. Like they literally thought they were betting on the opposite thing.

• 4:20Ryan Broderick?

  So I just pulled one up. This one hasn't resolved yet. This is Polymarket and it's Elon Musk's number of tweets from May 29th to June 5th, 2026, which is, I feel like if he knew, okay, well, whatever. Uh, and the top comment is in all caps, Elon, did you know Grok can say N words? And other AI app can't say it. Laughing while crying emoji. How cool is that? That's how cool is that?

• 4:51Speaker 01

  We're not sending our best, I don't think.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  I would like to believe that that's a 14 year old, but I actually think that you can't be 14 to be there. Like, I think that they actually...

• 5:04Ryan Broderick?

  Sure you can. This is the crypto one. There's no rules. That same user has the comment beneath that, which is, once again, in all caps, it says, Elon, I hope you release Grok 4.5 next week before 15th, so we can use it. And the user, their avatar is a dancing Pepe the Frog emoji.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  That's the CFO of Goldman Sachs, I believe.

• 5:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. This is actually Michael Saylor. This is just what he does in his free time. Do you know much about sort of the origins of prediction markets?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I know that, like, it started out as kind of an academic experiment, right? Like, I believe that, like, in the... This is, again, from research I did a long time ago. But, like, wasn't there somebody at some Midwestern university who was, like, trying to understand the wisdom of crowds, trying to understand, like, politics? Or at least maybe, like, theorized on, like, how you could harness this? I don't know. You tell me.

• 6:03Ryan Broderick?

  Kinda. Here, let me share my screen here. I'm gonna pull up an article in The Register from 2003, which is titled,

• 6:13Ryan Broderick?

  "Meet the Transhumanists Behind the Pentagon Terror Casino."

• 6:17Speaker 01

  This is a sick band name, by the way. Pentagon Terror Casino?

• 6:20Ryan Broderick?

  Pentagon Terror Casino goes very hard. And this is a line from this article. "If there was an otherworldly feel to the news last week that the Pentagon was investing in an online futures exchange to reward terrorist atrocities." So that's how that opens. And basically, it explains that these terror casinos, or what we would now call prediction markets, were started by DARPA. So you're kind of right. Why do you think DARPA would be interested in something like this?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  I would guess that figuring out... I mean, I'm still hung up on Terror Casino. But I would guess that you would... It really is. That you would want to be able, like...

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Prediction markets as a like an information vector for weird things that are happening. Like, I could see that as sort of an alternate intelligence collection tool. Right? That's sort of what I would gather something like someone like DARPA or an agency like DARPA wanting to use that for.

• 7:24Ryan Broderick?

  This is like an extremely libertarian brained idea, but they are basically trying to predict where terror attacks might happen after nine 11.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:35Ryan Broderick?

  And they thought that perhaps prediction markets could be a way to do that.

• 7:40Ryan Broderick?

  I

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Why are you laughing?

• 7:42Ryan Broderick?

  I'm sort of foggy on like how that would work in practice.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Just so like, like, is, are they like, are they hoping that like Al Qaeda is like, needs another form like income stream? Is that, are they they hoping that people are just going to start betting on this with a little of like, oh, man, like, you know, we're planning on doing something in, in March. Like, let's, let's hedge this thing.

• 8:06Ryan Broderick?

  The market is the guiding hand of society, Charlie. So if you, if you believe in the market, it's fine. Yeah, but that's, that's sort of, I mean, that was basically the idea is that like, there were a bunch of guys that had joined DARPA and they were experimenting with transhumanism and sort of information technology, prediction markets kept coming up. And the one guy in this group in the early 2000s that we're going to be talking about today is Robin Hanson. Are you familiar with the name?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 8:34Ryan Broderick?

  I'm very excited. So Robin Hanson, self-described on his blog at the time as a six foot, 185 pound, 40 year old, well-educated, married, white, male, American with two children.

• 8:50Ryan Broderick?

  Describes himself as a Jungian. He describes himself as a Jungian type ENTP.

• 8:58Ryan Broderick?

  Do you know what any of that means?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Not really. I'm not gonna lie to you.

• 9:02Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so the ENT personality type is extroverted intuitive thinking and perceiving.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:08Ryan Broderick?

  I don't remember which one I am because I don't care, but I'm I'm Slytherin in Harry Potter quizzes. He does. He explains that the the Jungian type of ENTPs tend to be oblivious of the rest of humanity, except as an audience. That sounds like actually most podcasters in a way.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's like the Andreessen Horowitz like recruiting profile.

• 9:35Ryan Broderick?

  Basically. So another sort of member of this cohort working on prediction markets in the 2000s

• 9:43Ryan Broderick?

  insists that markets provide answers, answers that can't be collectively worked out for ourselves. And so they're aggregators of knowledge and a divine knowledge that we couldn't arrive at through any other means.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  Divine is is interesting there. Yeah, that's that's that's a little, he's losing me. He's losing me with with the invocation of of the Lord.

• 10:08Ryan Broderick?

  Here's a bit more to the quote. Markets do an awfully good job of forecasting many events and trends. There there is a good reason to believe that a market set up to forecast the sort of political instability that leads to terrorism might work well, too. It does just dawn on me, though, that like, the market did not predict 9/11.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  No, Alex Jones did.

• 10:33Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, of course. I'm I guess I just like I'm not a libertarian. I guess I'm just not tapped into like the libertarian ethos enough to like really understand like how this could work.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  I don't really understand it either because so it I mean, I'm probably jumping ahead too much to where we're going at some point, but I feel like the whole point of of prediction markets, at least as they exist now in the in in the common understanding, is this idea that like,

• 11:01Speaker 01

  If you gather enough people, both with skin in the game, but also just with their own intuitions, over time, you get closer to the truth, right? Like, a very liquid prediction market is one with a ton of people who are putting money in. And so, you know, like, it makes a lot of sense to me, or rather, the most sense to me, with something like elections, right? Because everyone in a given country, you know, who is old enough and not disenfranchised, caveats, you know, is theoretically able to vote. And so if you took a huge market of people who are going to vote in a certain thing,

• 11:43Speaker 01

  ask them to wager, you should then, in this, like, perfect world, get something that is, like, close to the results, right? Like, the idea of, like, sort of almost replacing polling, but also with the idea of people, you know, talking, who should win, all that. And so, I get that. I do not understand how you, like, it really feels like the underpants gnome version of whatever, right? It's like, step one, create, you know, this, like, market to find political instability. Step three, accurate intel. It doesn't, doesn't track to me.

• 12:19Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and we don't have, like, a ton of info on how these early prediction markets worked. And so perhaps it's not totally fair to apply the way Kalshi or Polymarket works now to one of these, but I am trying to do it, and my brain is just sort of like grinding gears, trying to imagine it, where I'm like, if you, if you open up a prediction market, and you say, okay, you can make bets here on political instability around the world. Users would then do that, and so they'd be like, okay, like, Libya is gonna fall by

• 12:59Ryan Broderick?

  2026, or, we're doing it now, where, like, you know, the front page of Polymarket is saying that the US and Iran might have permanent, have, might, might have a permanent peace deal, and they have a bunch of dates listed out, and then people bet on which date a permanent peace deal would be, you know, solidified.

• 13:21Ryan Broderick?

  So in this situation, would like DARPA or the Pentagon be looking at this data of like what random people are betting on and be like, okay, then we can inform our foreign policy from that?

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Right. It seems to me to be the like equivalent of at that moment in time being like, let's go into an AOL chatroom and ask around, right? Let's, let's pull the hive mind and see what they have to say, right? It just, I mean, I can understand it as like, you know, have you seen the, the situation monitor apps that people have like vibe coded to, you know, like tracking all these different forms of data and they feel like they have some really good understanding of the world because they have all these different inputs in them. And mostly it's just like, you know, people LARPing, being in a situation room. I think that like, I could see that in some kind of large, you know, CIA, Pentagon, whatever

• 14:20Speaker 01

  kind of flow of information where you're like throwing that into some kind of model, even way back then. And that is like one lightly weighted input, right? Where it's just sort of like, and you've got a lot of people chattering about X, Y, or Z. Give it, you know, 0.0001% weight on, on your, on your thing. But to use it as like an actual good source of intel, it feels to me like you would need to be like, okay, well, we need a lot of Libyan participation in that market.

• 14:50Ryan Broderick?

  That's what I would, exactly. Like, were you ever on the data miner train back in the day?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  A little bit, a little bit, yeah.

• 14:58Ryan Broderick?

  I briefly used it before, like every app kind of shut off access to it. And for listeners who don't know, I'm talking about data miner was this magical tool that basically let you kind of stare at the fire hose of social media across every platform that existed like 15 years ago. And it did feel like jacking into the matrix. And particularly during breaking news events, it was super useful because you could set like a geo location and then in theory receive in a feed every public update. So like, I would use it for school shootings a lot. I bet, okay, like, let's type in the school. And then it's like every foursquare check in, every Instagram post that's geo tagged, every tweet that's geo tagged. And then through that, you could find stuff, you could sort

• 15:40Ryan Broderick?

  of monitor the situation properly. You can't do that anymore. And like, no platform allows themselves, other than Blue Sky, which has fire hose access. If you've ever used it, it'll melt your fucking face off, but it's, it's wild. And so I could see that. It's when you factor in the betting aspects where I go, I don't understand how this is useful in any way. Like, I would rather just raw OSINT, like, I would rather just like raw social media data, because in my mind, it's like untainted.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Well, this is the where the, the, the true wisdom of crowds stuff comes in, right? Because the idea is theoretically, like, people who are willing to back something with dollars, with their livelihood, theoretically assigns a higher level of certainty to it, right? Like, you're...

• 16:31Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  And, and so I get that. But yes, intelligence and betting are completely opposite things. Because one is just, is just like ground truth that you can analyze. And a lot of, a lot of noise with which you can maybe determine a signal. And the other is a bunch of people playing, like, doing game theory, essentially, right? Like, trying to figure out what the, the optimal outcome is of a given situation. And in so doing, it's like, people betting against what they think the common wisdom is so that the returns are better and everything. And what you end up getting is like, I think, a way more skewed picture.

• 17:11Ryan Broderick?

  I wouldn't even call it a picture. Like, it's so fundamentally confusing to me that I just don't think it makes sense. And I don't think it'll come as a surprise when I say that Robin Hanson, the godfather of prediction markets, had some pretty kooky beliefs. And before we go to a break, I would love for you to guess what kind of sicko Robin Hanson is.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Hmm. Um, is he like a repeal, no fault divorce guy? Like, is he sort of like?

• 17:46Ryan Broderick?

  We're gonna find out right after a word from our sponsors, DraftKings.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Bet normal.

• 17:53Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Bet, bet in a normal, cool way.

• 18:00Speaker 03

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• 18:31Ryan Broderick?

  I do think prediction markets have made me more supportive of casinos and casino environments in physical spaces. I actually think that like, we should have more casinos.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Because you used to have to go to the degenerate store.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  The closer you get to the most risky thing, which is a slot machine, right? Which is like, they could.

• 18:53Ryan Broderick?

  I think should be illegal, yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Slot machines can be rigged, they are rigged.

• 18:57Ryan Broderick?

  Digital ones definitely are rigged.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but there's all kinds of, like, basically ways that it goes from some kind of skill and some kind of like mitigation of risk to like zero skill and total risk. And what these like betting apps have done, and anything that's like in your phone, anything that brings a casino to you, reducing all that friction, most of what they are selling is closer to the slot machine version of risk, right?

• 19:27Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  It's closer to that, and it's more abstract in this way.

• 19:31Ryan Broderick?

  And then if you get to prediction, if you get to prediction markets, I think the fundamental lie that sort of supports the entire prediction market industry is that if you know more about the world. You can make a better prediction and a better bet. And not only do I think that's wrong, because prediction markets don't reflect reality. They're also a way to allow completely unfettered insider trading. So you're you're competing against someone who does know what's going to happen in a lot of cases. And none of this was really considered by Robin Hanson. The sicko who created this whole world we live in. And before the break, you said that maybe he was some sort of like no fault divorce guy.

• 20:15Ryan Broderick?

  I like, what is it like a, what's the, what's the court you go to? Oh, yeah, like a custody court guy, you know? He is not. He's a more complicated weirdo. Have you ever heard the term futarky or futarky?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:30Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. You sound excited to learn.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Terrified. So I Googled it and I am only looking at the auto completes and Robin Hanson's name is first. Futarky Robin Hanson.

• 20:42Ryan Broderick?

  Well, he invented the concept. He invented the concept.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:45Ryan Broderick?

  He created it in the mid 2000s. The New York Times sort of jumped on it at the time and then it was kind of lost. It was lost to time, but it comes back in the 2010s in a way we'll get to in just a second. So let's define it first. Futarky, proposed by economist Robin Hanson, is defined by elected officials who use prediction markets to determine policies that will have the most positive effect on the population. And it is also a type of society run by blockchains and decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs. And it's a portmanteau of future and anarchy.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:33Ryan Broderick?

  So what?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Sounds like porn. Like, it sounds like, it sounds like a porn category.

• 21:38Ryan Broderick?

  Futarky. Yeah, actually it does. When I say it out loud, it definitely does sound like that.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  What kind of porn are you imagining?

• 21:44Ryan Broderick?

  Let's not go down that road, Grant.

• 21:47Ryan Broderick?

  What are your sort of initial, what are your, Charlie, what are your kind of initial gut reactions to when I say, "Oh, like, these guys wanted to build a society run by prediction markets and built on top of blockchains and DAOs." What are your sort of thoughts there?

• 22:03Speaker 01

  A couple. The first thing, the first thing that pops into my head is that these guys, like, they all must be in the big AI labs now. Or at least like, like, the descendants of this, like, must be in Polycules in, you know, the Bay Area, like, posting on Less Wrong and doing, like, you know, strange AI safety stuff. The other is that they, they must be really fun to talk to. Like, it must, it must be really awesome to get cornered at a party by, by these guys.

• 22:37Ryan Broderick?

  We're going to talk about, like, what Robin Hanson's been up to recently. He's still with us. He's still alive. I will say, he had a bit of a side quest into the cryonics or cryogenics movement for a while.

• 22:51Ryan Broderick?

  And he's come back out as a prediction market guy. I think, you know, he's trying to be part of the, he's trying to be part of the victory lap there.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 23:00Ryan Broderick?

  To mix results. And he's written a couple of different books. His last one is probably not going to be shocking to you. It's called "The Elephant in the Brain," and it's basically kind of like a thing about, like, mental health and how, you know, there's questions that we should be asking about how we treat mental health.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 23:26Ryan Broderick?

  He also, just ask, this, okay, we're going to get there, but this dude fucking loves asking questions.

• 23:33Ryan Broderick?

  He loves it. And he also wrote a book called "The Age of M," which is a, like, sort of speculative, nonfiction book, which the subtitle of that is "Work, Love, and Life: When Robots Rule the Earth." And that love there is, I think, a perfect transition to talk about what Robin Hanson's been up to recently. But before we get there, I just want to sort of say that his futarky idea did not just die. It didn't just disappear. It disappeared for a little bit, but in 2014, it came back. And can you guess who revived the idea of futarky and was very excited about it circa 2014?

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Is it, total guess, is it, uh, Balaji, the Andreessen Horowitz guy who's like the seasteading kinda?

• 24:22Ryan Broderick?

  You are on the right track for sure. Let me share my screen with you so you can see this in all its glory. So this is Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:34Ryan Broderick?

  He's very excited about futarky. Um, and he even came back to it in 2024 on his website, sort of talking about how we're like with prediction markets like Kali and Polymarket, very close to a futarkal, futarkal society.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Hit my favorite Vitalik thing is that, uh, he wanted-

• 24:59Ryan Broderick?

  Is it the furry thing? Is it the furries?

• 25:00Speaker 01

  No, he wanted to replace pregnant women with synthetic wombs.

• 25:04Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  And like was posting about that and was like very confused why everyone got mad at him.

• 25:09Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. So this is, this is exactly where we need to go next because Robin Hanson, uh, you know, prediction markets, libertarianism, bitcoins, really into AI, cryogenics. In 2018, he caused quite a bit of stir when he wrote on a Substack, where else, a post that I will share with you right now titled, "Two Types of Envy." And it's, uh, is basically a sex distribution argument, like applying market economics to the access of sex. And I think you can kind of tell everything you need to know about this post by the two updates

• 25:53Ryan Broderick?

  he added after it was published. The first one reads, "Though the news article I cite focuses on male complaints, my comments here are about sex inequality in general, applied to both men and women. Not that I see anything particularly wrong with focusing on men sometimes. Let me also clarify that personally, I am not very attracted to non-insurance-based redistribution policies of any sort, though I do like to study what causes others to be so attracted." Then another update added a few hours later. A tweet on this post induced a lot of discussion on Twitter, much of it which accuses me of advocating enslaving and raping women. Apparently, many people can't imagine any other way to reduce or moderate sex inequality.

• 26:37Ryan Broderick?

  And then in parentheses, it reads redistribute means change the distribution. And so his post is basically arguing that like the access to sex, specifically for men in his post, should be treated as sort of a commodities issue. And that we need to sort of deal with the inequality of sex distribution in ways, basically.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  It's the very, I'm not advocating for enslaving and raping women t-shirt is raising a lot of questions.

• 27:10Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, yeah. He, he is a markets guy that can really only see the world through markets. He believes that markets are the only way to sort of deal with anything. And this post caused a lot of trouble for old Robin Hanson. In The New Yorker, Gianluca Tolentino described Hanson's Substack post as flippantly dehumanizing in a article titled "The Rage of the Incels." He was very surprised by that reaction. I guess he could have used a prediction market, but he didn't.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Like, the thing that I think about when you say all this is that this type of person has only become more central to like, essentially like power via the tech world, via all this AI stuff, and also just like the ascendancy of the, of like that kind of stuff in, in culture. And it's like that, like, that coldly rational, sort of like, I don't know why everyone is upset here. If we just... Force women to do, you know, to give their bodies out based off of, you know, this weighted exchange and set of values. Like, I don't understand why everyone is freaking

• 28:25Speaker 01

  out about this. This is like, this makes sense. And, and it's just like, it's these people who like, think that they are seeing the matrix, but like, they are so ported in on this one thing that they actually like, they, they just don't like grapple with the fundamental part of like, of being human. Like, I'm, I'm thinking about this, the futarchy thing. And like, the idea of, like, I, I'm looking at its very stupid Google summary of, of all of it. So it's probably riddled with theirs. But like, the idea that like, people in society are using their real money, like their money, to bet on these different, like, what is the best thing and what should win?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Skin in the game, being able to do this thing. One of the reasons why people like proponents favorite, is that it gets money out of politics. But like, no, that is just, what you've done is

• 29:18Ryan Broderick?

  made money. Into money.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Politics is just money. Like, politics is, is, is a market. Like, I don't, you know, like, yes, it gets rid of lobbying in the sense that like, you don't have these outside interest groups, but like, no, you have turned it in, into an actual game. And I just think it's like, it's just interesting, because I think when Gio probably wrote that, that incel piece, like, my guess, if I were to go back and read it, it's, it's kind of like, here are a bunch of like, edgelord weirdo freaks, coming from these different corners of the world, who have some kind of, you know, light influence and have these super weird, either like, reductionist or rationalist or whatever kind of bad ideas. And now that's just like, to some

• 30:05Speaker 01

  degree, like a dominant culture. We just live in that world now, fully.

• 30:11Ryan Broderick?

  So I, I went on a vacation, a couple, a couple of weeks ago. Thank you. Congrats.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Humble brag.

• 30:17Ryan Broderick?

  Humble brag. And I had enough brain space to finally like, start reading books again. And one of the books that I picked up, I'm still working my way through it, but it's titled, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. It's by, written by a historian named Walter Rodney. And it's, it's interesting. It's published in 1972. Rodney was killed because of the book afterwards, after it was published. It's a Kind of Marxist historical analysis of capitalism, starting from 1500s Africa and sort of, you know, thinking about systems that way. And AI has been on my mind as I'm reading it and thinking about systems and thinking about like what AI means, you know, in the evolution of capitalism, like what does it mean to these guys? And the, the

• 31:00Ryan Broderick?

  conclusion that I come to more and more often is that like, these guys that we're talking about basically just like worship capitalist markets to such a degree that like they, like they can't really think beyond them. Like it sort of colors everything they think and how they see reality. Here's another like tweet from Hanson in 2019 that I think is, is important to point out here. He wrote, slave owners did many bad things, but each owner didn't do every single thing. Like, these guys are trying to paint themselves as these kind of like, living in the abstract, I'm going to solve problems just by like, how we could solve them and think through these like, thought, you know, games. But

• 31:41Ryan Broderick?

  it's almost always as a way to run defense for the free market and capitalism.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and like, you can see this in, like, the lot, like, this logic has won in so many different ways, even with people who aren't fully like this, like full prediction market weirdo worship.

• 32:00Ryan Broderick?

  It's the water we all swim in.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  But yeah, like, like, I, you know, I saw something the, the other day with the whole Barry Weiss 60 Minutes firing people thing. And people being like, this was all, like Scott Pelley stood up to Barry Weiss and the CBS executives at 60 Minutes, because like, clearly he's just trying to get like a big independent Substack media thing, like making all, and it's like, these people could not see a decision being made outside of the realm of like, a broader, five dimensional chess.

• 32:34Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  You know, money calculation of like, how can I be worth more to, you know, this market? Like, how can I get, Scott Pelley made like $5 million last year, you know, like this guy, they can't see somebody at the end of their career, standing up to power, because they don't like the way that it is managed and treated, this, you know, this thing that ostensibly he cares very much about. But it's like, it's very telling, you just saw a ton of that from this type of person on the internet, just being like,

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, we can all see through your play. It's like this total cynical. It's all about what I can, what I can make or like how I can increase my value on the free market.

• 33:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  Sort of situation.

• 33:15Ryan Broderick?

  Like, and, and the internet, I think, is at this stage of it becomes so corrupted by that kind of thinking that it is actually beginning to break social media. I mean, I've written about this recently, but we are, you know, nine or 10 waves in of discord cycles where people are like, this thing that I saw on my feed isn't real. It's a marketing stunt. And then, or discovering that this thing that everyone thought was real was a marketing stunt. And it's like, both are poisonous. Because everyone just believes that everyone's on the take now. And it actually makes me kind of sad. This entire line of thinking that like, things are somehow more pure because money is exchanged.

• 33:57Ryan Broderick?

  Like, I actually can't even wrap my head around it. Like, it's not, it's just not part of my DNA to think that way.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  I, I will say, though, going to these markets, I don't really respect the point of view of, of polymarket, right? But compared to Calci, like polymarket is much more hardcore with what they'll allow people like, what, they're like, we're fine with the war markets. You know, Calci is like using, like, running billboards in Washington DC that are like, we don't let you bet on war, you know? And it's like, oh.

• 34:26Ryan Broderick?

  I love when a company takes a stand like that. That's beautiful.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. But the one thing that when people do, you know, ask these moral questions about prediction markets, polymarket is very much of the mind, or at least, you know, projecting the, the ethos broadly of like, insider trading is, is, is our advantage, right? Like, these markets get good when you have a guy in the Pentagon being like, how do I make $400,000 real quick off of the fact that in four hours, you know, we're gonna like, Drone strike, whatever, right? And I can at least see the rationale there, right? Like, that is like, that is the most stone cold cynical, like, listen,

• 35:14Speaker 01

  that is intelligence. If you can convince people to betray their, you know, their classification, their government clearances, because they want to make some money, it's absolutely cancerous for broader society. But that is actually making the prediction market, like, into a source of intel, like what we were saying before.

• 35:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  I think that that is the, is the, is the logic, like, the cold logic, what you're talking about, where, like, I think a lot of these places are gonna go.

• 35:44Ryan Broderick?

  Charlie, aren't you presupposing, like, a linear bet?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  What do you mean by a linear bet, I guess?

• 35:50Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I don't really know what the term would be, but like, okay, so like, let's, let's take your, your Pentagon analyst that knows that we're gonna bomb Iran at 8:00 PM on Saturday.

• 36:02Ryan Broderick?

  There is one version of the bet where you bet we're gonna bomb Iran at 8:00 PM on a Saturday. But couldn't you use that insider information to, like,

• 36:13Ryan Broderick?

  short the market?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  I think the most likely outcome is using it, again, I'm like, I'm not a great trader.

• 36:19Ryan Broderick?

  How were you insider?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  How was I doing it? Yes.

• 36:22Ryan Broderick?

  When I do a polymarket bet of what your word count on your next story is gonna be, how do you know, you know, to follow that, you know?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Well, you can, theoretically, I could imagine you could hedge, right? So what you could do is you could, you could make the bet on the thing that you know about, right?

• 36:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  But in the event that information changes, you know, Donald Trump sees something on Truth Social, decides to do something completely different 10 minutes later, but you've already locked in your thing, you could probably hedge it in other bets. Like, this is a thing that you're starting to see now. Like, these companies are even saying that this is, like, one of the uses for prediction markets is that you can bet on certain things to hedge outcomes in, in your life, right? Like, someone was talking about using this with, like, the weather. Right? Where if if you have, if you have a bet on a like a sporting event or something

• 37:17Speaker 01

  happening, you can bet on that thing. But in the event that like it gets rained out or something like that, you could also make a bet on like the weather. That's a pretty bad example. But like this idea that these everything can interact with the other thing. And that is, I think, ostensibly how you could do something like that.

• 37:38Ryan Broderick?

  I had a buddy whose first job out of college was a data analyst for a weather futures company. And basically buying and selling weather data to insurance companies. So they could use it as a stock market for like agro companies.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Right. That would be even that would be a better one. Right? Like, yeah, bet on like, like basically, like, use it to bet on like commodities and then use the prediction market to hedge that thing based off of, you know, betting on a drought or something and betting on like, you know, sorghum futures.

• 38:06Ryan Broderick?

  Or causing a drought. After a word from our sponsors, we're going to talk about the different kinds of markets that, you know, are at play here because we've mentioned them a bunch, but I want to sort of define what makes them differently. What makes them special. But first, a word from our sponsors, Barstool Sports.

• 38:28Ryan Broderick?

  So we've, we've been talking about Calci and Polymarket. The major difference, Calci can't bet on war, got to use real money. Polymarket is crypto based. Calci was created in Manhattan by two financial analysts around 2018. Polymarket is also, I think, now based in in the US. Yeah. And the major difference, Polymarket, you can use, you have to use cryptocurrency. And the third company I want to bring up here, which we haven't mentioned yet is Stake. Are you familiar with Stake?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Only because aren't they're like very involved in like viral video distribution, right?

• 39:06Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. They so they are the, they are an Australian Curacao in online casino. They are owned by Medium Rare NV. And Medium Rare NV also owns Kick. And Kick is the kind of like, it's where Clivicular is. It's the renegade live streaming platform. They don't do prediction markets, but they do flood the internet with viral content and support it via gambling, which

• 39:38Ryan Broderick?

  I would say over the last four or five months has kind of created an alternate structure for prediction markets where it's like gambling is going directly into internet popularity and creating like cultural moments in a really strange way. It's so it's not like you're betting like clavicular is going to become famous, but clavicular's fame and gambling are intrinsically linked.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Dude, that little monologue you just did, like, we live in hell. This is the worst possible outcome of all of this.

• 40:11Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's pretty bad.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Clavicular, you know, it's the butterfly effect of like, somebody opens a casino in Curacao, and like, this dude is just running people over with a cyber truck 14 months later, right?

• 40:23Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 40:25Ryan Broderick?

  What's really interesting, I mean, like, yeah, what I say interesting, but as, yeah, what's really horrifying is like, people are debasing themselves on live streams to generate revenue and receive revenue from a casino. They should do a prediction market and just let people bet on what they're going to do to themselves on a live stream.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Kick spending so much money in the whole clipping game, right? Which is then, you know, the clips being used to populate all these different social networks, which is then, I know there's this huge debate, you've written about this, like, the idea of like, what is popularity? But that aside, like, this idea of creating essentially your own organic or inorganic popularity, but that it's being funded by this casino, you know, like, that's why they have, you know, millions of dollars to spend on, you know, allowing people to, paying people to clip clavicular and Nick Fuentes in a nightclub or whatever. Like, it's all, when you see the money being connected in that way, you're like, oh, God, it's not that this guy's not popular, but like,

• 41:28Speaker 01

  look where it all came from, right?

• 41:30Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Did you watch clavicular get a nose job on live stream the other day?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I did not. I did not.

• 41:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they just did it right there on kick. And what I think is really fascinating-

• 41:39Speaker 02

  I thought he was done live streaming for his mental health.

• 41:41Ryan Broderick?

  No, he stopped taking steroids because he wants to become fertile enough to have a baby. But he is streaming still.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  I think a baby will solve all of his problems.

• 41:49Ryan Broderick?

  But now he's grandpa maxing as he's losing like, his, his weight, but now, but he got a, he got a nose job to sort of, to try to stay, to try to keep his, his ascension rank up.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  It really makes me think of like, there was a- A lot of when the Truman Show came out, I was reasonably young, but there were a lot of people like, man, this is like the saddest possible version of whatever. And like, the Truman Show is the Pleasantville version.

• 42:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I would love.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Like, they could not, like, you could not have imagined actually how bad it's going to be when the guy just turns his life into a full-time reality show.

• 42:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. And, you know, for all of the talk about prediction markets predicting behavior, what is so funny about this is that it is creating a lot of behavior that we did not predict. Like, and it is influencing human behavior. And here are some recent examples. So in February, Kalshi revealed that there was an insider trading case involving Mr. Beast's editor. Do you remember this?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Slightly, slightly.

• 42:53Ryan Broderick?

  So let me, let me spin through this. This is from a, an NPR piece. "The Mr. Beast employee, who Kalshi identified as Artem Kaptur, in regulatory filings traded around $4,000 on markets related to the streamer." That's not that much, actually. "Many people place wagers about Mr. Beast on Kalshi. People bet hundreds of thousands of dollars on what he will say in his next video. There are markets on the number of subscribers he will bring on this year. And people are betting when exactly Mr. Beast will get married. Kalshi investigators say Kaptur was using proximity to the streamer as a way of trying to make quick cash." Then there was the incident about a month later, when, do you know about the, the weather tampering

• 43:38Ryan Broderick?

  device? You were talking about the weather earlier, the weather tampering device in France?

• 43:41Speaker 01

  No.

• 43:42Ryan Broderick?

  Well, once again, this is from an NPR piece. "Authorities in France are investigating possible tampering with a weather monitoring device at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris after an unusual temperature spike was recorded around the same time a polymarket trader cashed in." Basically, this guy like went up to the weather, like, reading machine with a blow dryer and blasted it real fast to like win his market.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Honestly, that's just, that's admirable. Like, like, that's just good old fashioned, like, work ethic, right there.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  I think he's a hero.

• 44:13Ryan Broderick?

  I do think if you do a crime that doesn't hurt anybody, and it's really funny, like, you shouldn't get punished. Like, you get maybe, like, probation, like, just like, you can't, you can't do any shit. Here's, here's what I'll say. I think if you do something that can be reasonably classified as shenanigans, if you don't get up to any shenanigans for, like, six months, like, you shouldn't have to get punished, I think.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  The shenanigans defense. Yeah, of course.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Or we, like, take away, we take away access to, like, your social media accounts for six months, right? Because it's like, that will only increase shenanigans. And then you get it back. You get it back, yeah.

• 44:44Ryan Broderick?

  Or you're like, you have to, like, read a book and do a book report or something. Like, you gotta, like, you know, just, like, chill for a sec. I would, I would classify this next case as not, distinctly not shenanigans. This is a, so in April, right after the weather tampering, a US soldier was charged with using classified information to bet on the removal of Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela. And you, you had sort of talked about the hypotheticals here, and this is really interesting. He was placing bets that totaled around $32,000 that Maduro be out of power, and he ended up making about $400,000.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:20Ryan Broderick?

  So, once again, if you're listening and you're part of the US government and you want to do insider trading, I would say, try to do that, like, the opposite. Like, don't bet on what you think is gonna happen. Use your insider knowledge to make other kinds of less direct bets, you know?

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Why?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  This is not financial advice.

• 45:40Ryan Broderick?

  No, this is, this is, this is financial advice. Oh, and then, of course, most recently, Queen of Queens, George Santos, is being investigated for insider trading on Colly.

• 45:52Ryan Broderick?

  Which, that guy, too many shenanigans. I think that, that he's just too many.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  What a scam. What a lovable scam.

• 46:00Ryan Broderick?

  He was also, it seems like he was betting bank. He was betting a lot on, like, who would attend the State of the Union address, I guess. And, you know, I don't really know much about that story, but I'm gonna say, like, he did that. Like, I actually don't have any problem saying that.

• 46:15Ryan Broderick?

  You know, that sort of takes us to where we are now, which is this casino world that is a nightmare, as you said. I want to know more about this stuff, but I also sort of find it like weirdly boring to talk about.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  The part of it that is always interesting is who's who's up to what, right? Like being able, like as a reporter, before those stories, some of those stories broke about the, you know, the the Maduro guy, the in in the military, like I was hearing chatter from people in Washington being like, I, I know that this is happening. Like, I can't, I don't have proof, but like, I know this is going on in in the in these different places. And that, to me, is interesting. But then, once it happens, it's like, yeah, okay, this is happening. To me, what I think is really interesting is this broader, like, the, a little bit of

• 47:12Speaker 01

  what we were talking about earlier, but this broader theory of attention and the financialization logic. And this is something that I think kind of goes throughout everything in in culture, politics, in media, sports, which is this idea of like, you cannot sell a product anymore in today's like attention economy, like just like a, you have to sell some derivative of it. Like, it's just too saturated to make any good money selling any kind of product, right? So you, you sell instead like a financialized part of it. So in sports, right? I was talking with Max Reed about this a while ago. And he was basically saying like, I think we've

• 47:54Speaker 01

  reached, you know, like, peak sports, right? Like, the distribution deals, the TV contracts, all that different stuff shows that we have reached like a real saturation. Like, people are getting the most out of sports that we can at in this moment. The coverage is what it is. And sports betting.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Has created a derivative of sports, of these games, right? In the same way that like you package a bunch of subprime loans together into this like tranche and you call it a credit default swap or whatever. You're taking these elements of a sports game, right? So like, how many free throws are the Knicks gonna make in the third quarter of the NBA Finals, game two, right? And you can bet on that and you're selling to fans is like, yes, you may not be as interested in the NBA as you were, right? Because it's become saturated, it's become this thing, they mess around with the three-point line, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But here's this thing we can sell you, right? Because that is easier, it's more interesting, it's more attention getting, all of that, right?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And it is this way of like commoditizing that. You see the same sort of thing, I think, in politics, right? Like, we have reached peak politics in terms of just so much attention and people becoming obsessed with this stuff. So like CNN is partnering with Kalshi in order to pull this type of like information so that Harry Enton can go to the big board in the middle of the day or on, you know, whatever, the 7pm show and talk about how all these markets are playing and doing. And that is a derivative of a political race, of the horse race, that you can then sell to people. And I just think it's like, this is what is happening in this like age of just like

• 49:37Speaker 01

  crazy saturated, everyone is addled by the internet and it's so commoditized that you have all these people finding these weird ways to sell you something, even if that's just like getting you to pay attention so, you know, you can sell ads.

• 49:53Ryan Broderick?

  I don't disagree with that all happening. I think that's actually the correct diagnosis, but I do, I do want to push back against the concept of peak.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 50:04Ryan Broderick?

  Because I think it's self-imposed. I don't think that we actually are at peak politics or, I can't speak for sports, but I watched the Knicks game this week and like, you know, I don't think, I don't think there's a, I don't think there's such a thing as peak Hollywood, peak sports, peak politics. I think it really comes down to, we have built this system that is keeping a lot of people in power, whether financially or politically or with attention. And they refuse to let go and we have no mechanisms for making them let go. And so it's not so much that like these specific things like there's no more like I I kind of think like let's go with basketball. I kind of think the game of basketball is like infinite. Like you can kind of figure out like whatever you want to do there. In fact,

• 50:48Ryan Broderick?

  like the biggest growth, I think area for the NBA right now is the WNBA because they're like, well, there is an entire other gender that like might want to play. Right? I would watch NBA babies. Sure. Like, you know, you can do as many spin offs as you want. I don't think there's such a thing culturally as peaks. I think when we say that, what we're talking about are are like, we are in a system run by the same people who have basically been running that system for most of our adult lives. They refuse to let go. And then you start to run out of space. And so prediction markets and AI and video slop and all the rest of the horrors of the modern age are basically just them like tearing off smaller and smaller pieces of the loaf of

• 51:30Ryan Broderick?

  bread to like, keep us satisfied because they don't want to let go. I have to keep telling myself that like, things don't have to be like this. And like prediction markets are just like, the simplest way to get you to literally buy into the perpetuation of the system that we're all stuck in.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  I think that's a really good point about the the peak nature of it. What I'm trying to get at is is like the extractive quality, right? Like, yes, maybe, maybe the resources are infinite, like the well underneath it is is somewhat infinite in terms of like you can, you can pull stuff out of whatever piece of culture or sports or politics forever. Like, interest is going to continue. But the difficulty of the extraction, it gets a little bit harder. And the thing that you are selling to people becomes a little bit more abstract each time, right? A little bit less

• 52:26Ryan Broderick?

  And I think to the point of absurdity, crypto is, is like, NFTs are a perfect example, where it's like, we have no culture left to give you. You can buy a facsimile of that culture, and then you can use that as a specula- like a speculation market, prediction market, same idea. You could buy into the possibility of something happening, which is just absurd.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I think it stems from the logic of, and I know, you know, things weren't invented at the, you know, in the year 2000 or anything, but like, it stems from the logic, the financialized logic of these investment banks and these, these, these organizations that have found this way, like the hyper capitalism portion of, of all of this, right? And, and then post 2008, the idea that like, oh, you can do this, and you know, you can't really get in trouble for it. Yeah. Like, there's, there's no problem here. Like, there, there isn't a societal, societal pushback in a huge, huge way to creating these packaged derivatives,

• 53:27Speaker 01

  right? Like, oh, yeah, like, we'll take the thing that we have and, and give you this, like you said, like, strip off different pieces of it, mix it all around, put it together, and then hand it to you. And it's like, oh, it's different. Sure. I'll like, I'll, I'll take a bite of that. I think that it is all following that type of logic, because it is lucrative, and there's really no consequence to giving it to people.

• 53:51Ryan Broderick?

  To, to go off on like, a, a pretty insane tangent, but I swear this matters. I recently went to see the movie Backrooms with Panic World researcher Adam, and we were talking about it afterwards, and he said something really interesting, where he's like, it was so nice. He, he said, it was so nice to see a 21st century movie, because we're basically only ever shown 20th century movies. And how like, everything in culture still feels extreme, like to him, because he's like, he's Gen Z, he's like, everything around me feels so 20th century, that when I see something that looks 21st century, even if it's not great, I'm excited. And that has sort of been worming its way into my brain over the last week of like, right, like, I-

• 54:37Ryan Broderick?

  I had this conversation with my girlfriend all the time where I'm like, if we're sitting on the couch and we're watching TV and we look around our apartment and you close your eyes and you imagine doing that exact same move, but it's 1999, I guarantee you it's almost exactly the same. The devices may have changed, the amount of cords in the room may have changed, but it's not like a fundamentally different shift the way it probably would have been if you were 30 in 1930, right? You know, you're 35 in 1930, you close your eyes, you're like, well, I grew up outside and now I'm inside, you know, for a large chunk of the population, but for the majority of the American population, life hasn't really changed that much since like

• 55:19Ryan Broderick?

  1999, like even in terms of clothing, like for the most part, that is sort of what I'm trying to get at when I say like, this is all self-imposed, like this is, this is an entire class that is making us live in a perpetual, you know, end of the 20th century.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  What's so interesting about you bringing up the movies part is, well, I was thinking about all this, this, you know, derivatives thing, selling you the derivative of the thing, right? I was thinking about, this was a while back, but traditional movie marketing, there was that, that movie that came out with Robert Pattinson, Jennifer Lawrence, right? Two big, like A-list Hollywood.

• 55:56Ryan Broderick?

  They're like married and she's like having a bad time, right?

• 55:59Speaker 01

  I, I don't really know, but it sounds right. Anyway, kind of a grim movie apparently, but the marketing of it, they spent all this money and all this.

• 56:08Ryan Broderick?

  Die my love, die my love.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  And they went to Vanity Fair or whatever and did all these like, you know, viral moment things where it's like Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence are interviewing each other with some weird card game thing, right?

• 56:21Ryan Broderick?

  Like eating hot wings and playing with puppies and doing a lie detector test.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  And doing all these things that are part of like the movie marketing junket right now.

• 56:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  None of those things, I was talking to someone who was, you know, sort of tangentially involved with all this stuff, none of those things. Mentioned the movie at all. They were literally just clips of stuff to give to people to be like, "These are charismatic people. You know you love them." And hey, at the end of it, oh, there's a movie in theaters. It wasn't what the movie is about, wasn't anything. And it was like, oh, huge surprise. Nobody went to see this movie.

• 56:53Ryan Broderick?

  Well, the movie, I just looked at that. The movie is about a woman spiraling into psychosis following postpartum depression. So I imagine the like, let's play a like, like Icebreaker game YouTube clip didn't really work for that.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Right. But also, the thing is like, they were, they were selling this like attentional derivative, right? Like they were selling themselves in such a this way. And then you look at something like Backrooms, right? And, and a lot, I think a lot of people have the sort of origin story. It's like too tidy or whatever. And there's like, oh, it's like YouTube on the big screen or whatever. But it is something that is like based around a huge part of a culture that a bunch of people have access to, understand, like they're primed to want to go enjoy this thing, see a different representation of it. And they're like, I can't, like, people are taking, already taking the wrong lessons from this, right? The lesson is, is what Adam was saying, which is that like, this is something that is like, a piece of culture that like,

• 57:53Speaker 01

  I can, I can like ping off of, right? Like, we're vibrating on the same frequency. That's what gets people to go out of their homes and see a movie. But this, this other idea is like, oh, it's just like, you know, YouTube, YouTube's gonna make movies now. And I think it speaks a little too, like, it wasn't selling a derivative of a culture thing. It was just selling something new. Or it was selling something like, you know, unique in a certain way to a unique set of people. And I think that's what, what resonated with me when you're like, we don't have to live in this exact continuum of this exact thing of like, you know, IP billion trillion sequels, this type of thing, because that's part of the financialization logic.

• 58:35Ryan Broderick?

  To loop us back to where we started with today's episode, in the early 2000s, there were a whole bunch of weird guys that appeared kind of right after nine 11. And they're like, you know, they had a bunch of sci fi utopian ideas. But if you drill down into almost every one of those ideas, it is actually the same thing, which is we are promising you that we can put the entire 20th century in amber and you can manage it. If we're talking about AI, if we're talking about crypto, if we're talking about prediction markets, it is all the same thing, which is to use the term you were using, we're going

• 59:17Ryan Broderick?

  to chop up the 20th century into derivatives and we're going to convince people to buy into it and pay for its like perpetuation. So there won't be new things, but you can pay for the luxury of having the old things sold back to you. Or in the, in the, in the example of prediction markets, we're not going to fundamentally make sports an easier thing to enjoy or watch or go to. But if you want to count up the amount of dunks that could happen in a game and then make some money on that, or more realistically, lose a lot of money on that, that's a form of entertainment that you can do for cheaper than it would be to actually go to a game. And it would be easier because you can do it from your phone in the bathroom.

• 59:59Ryan Broderick?

  And like that, everywhere I look now across the entire cultural landscape, it is just that business model over and over and over again. We're going to sell you an echo of a thing that should be fundamentally overhauled for a new century, but we're not going to do it because if we did, we might lose power.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Not just culturally, man. What is make America great again?

• 1:00:22Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, no, I mean, politics is part of culture. Yeah. Across all of all of society.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Like, look at the freaking White House X account. It is selling you. Like, you know, a very white nationalized version of the 20th century.

• 1:00:37Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, it's everything. It's everywhere and it's everything. And it is, once you see it, you see it everywhere and then you start feeling very suffocated by it. And I think whenever I think about prediction markets for too long, I start to feel kind of crazy where I'm like, we all could just not do this, but they're preying on sort of like these base instincts of like, you know, the addictive nature of gambling, the all consuming nature of attention, whether you're giving it or receiving it, like the base instincts of, you know, racism or misogyny or whatever it is, like they know the buttons to push. And I just want to get in on the action. I'm tired of being a cultural critic. I want to get in on the next one of these. So I'm trying to think of what could we chop up

• 1:01:19Ryan Broderick?

  from the last century and sell to people in bits and pieces that would sort of prey on the most mentally ill and vulnerable members of our population?

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Journalism?

• 1:01:30Ryan Broderick?

  No, there's no fucking money in journalism.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  No, but I think you just actually really hit on it where it's like, it's selling that you get to be a part of the thing that they're saying is the thing that is really happening. While everything feels dead in the water is also a big factor to this.

• 1:01:44Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, but I want to get, I want, I don't want to lose focus here. Charlie, what can we do to make money here? Because that's all that matters. I don't want to make anything new. I want to sell what has already happened to an audience.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  I think it's, I think it's Furbies, Tamagotchis.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  My mind is going to like the AI moment right now, right? And as you were talking about this, I was thinking about something someone told me the other day about the AI booster is seeing their own reflection and like getting scared, right? And the idea, and one of them is like, the way they're like, look, all of this stuff just repeats.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  What we have been talking about forever, right? Like the sci fi stuff like this is like, this is Skynet. This is all this stuff. This could actually happen. And they're like, and it's crazy that like, we just, you know, built these models and this is what they're producing. It's like, dude, it's all fucking trained on all of that information. Like you, you basically just built the thing that like, including all the stuff in the past, right? Like it's very odd. There's no ability for them to see like, no, we made, we made this because of the culture. And of course, the, that culture got mashed together and created this thing that seems like, you know, it predicted the future. Like there's no, there's, to bring it back to like prediction, like it, we didn't predict

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  AI, we just created a lot of science fiction. A lot of people got like, pilled off that science fiction and then built the thing, you know? And it was trained off of all of that science fiction.

• 1:03:18Ryan Broderick?

  Like it's totally looped. It's totally circular. It's, I think you and I have had, had very similar experiences during this era, but between like 2003 and 2013, there was new stuff happening like all the time. And I remember the feeling of like genuinely seeing something new and being like, whoa. And now when I see something that is purported to be new, it is a different feeling where I'm like, that's not really new. It's just sort of like a rehash of a thing that I saw. It's like kind of different, but it's not like, it's not the same muscle memory feeling of like, whoa, like I, this sounds so silly, but I remember the first time I opened Foursquare and I was like, I've never seen anything like this before. Uh, the first time I like, I don't know, used Twitter during a breaking news event.

• 1:04:03Ryan Broderick?

  The first time I like downloaded music onto an iPod. The first time I used Google Maps rather than printing out MapQuest. Like I remember newness and I feel like the further we go down this road, like the harder it becomes to remember newness.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  What's funny is that a lot of people would be like, dude. I, you know, I vibe coded a website or whatever thing, or I have agents that are doing this thing like,

• 1:04:29Ryan Broderick?

  Claude Bot, Claude Bot felt genuinely new to me. That actually blew my mind.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  I agree that it felt new and it did that stuff. What's interesting about that, though, is that it's like, it's like a total outsourcing, right? So it's like, it is, it is, it is new, but it's like new in the way of like, I don't have to, like, I give, I give up on this thing, right? Like transferring all your music to an iPod and carrying it around with you is getting rid of a certain type of friction. But it's also not like, oh, this machine listened to music for me and gave me the memory of like having listened to music, right? Like, that's not, that's not what is going on. And there's a little more of that with some of the, the AI stuff. It's just like, no, I'm just not going to do that anymore because these machines are just going to try to do that for me.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  It's interesting to think, to think about that and then to link it to, you know, a lot of people talk about, like, The Economist, Kyla Scanlon, has, has a lot of stuff about, you know, the path of predictable progress being kind of erased in this financialized world. And like, you know, especially for, for younger generations and this idea that, that, you know, they, in that system, it is a rational response to create a bunch of polymarket accounts or invest in crypto or do these types of things because you are essentially, you are hedging against reality. And then, you know, the nature of, of not being able to earn as much as your parents or not have access to, you know, whatever, the American dream or a home or whatever.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, I think about that world, which is caused by all this financialization that people feel. And also the stagnation that you're talking about with like not having these, these new experiences. And it's like, no wonder the, the consumer confidence vibes and all of like the vibes about how the world is going are so awful, even if they're not necessarily reflected in all the economic data or whatever, right? Like, there's this huge debate always between like the vibe session and what's really happening. And it's like, Dude, just put all of these forces together.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  People who are just stuck consuming a less pure experience that's being repackaged and sold to them with higher consequences without access to these new things. It's gonna feel like shit. Like, it's just gonna feel awful every day and just kind of like, alright, I guess I'll just, you know, continue to distract myself in whatever way.

• 1:07:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I think that sounds cool. I think I'm into that. I think that's good.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  We just have to monetize the bad feeling. Like, that's what we have to do.

• 1:07:09Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Like, that's how we get it. That's how we make our, make our money. Like, we have to, like, can we use despair to power data centers? Right? Like, can we turn it into energy to fuel artificial intelligence? And I think that, that is how we end up on the mega yacht.

• 1:07:27Ryan Broderick?

  I, I think you actually like came up with like the perfect business model, which is that it's some kind of service where maybe we cut open your head or it's like we stick something in your ear to like trigger an impulse in your brain, but we create the false memory of enjoying a piece of art. So you don't actually have to do it, but you remember that, like, you create, you have a memory that of like, that was good. And we could probably create like a gambling situation where like you could gamble on what kind of experience you want to have a false memory for. So it could be a bad one, you know? But it could be a good one.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:59Ryan Broderick?

  So I'm gonna get to work on that. And in the meantime, I'm gonna raise capital by attaching my AI agent to Polymarket and just try to make as much money as I can. But I want to thank you for coming on the show, joining our three-timer league. Charlie, every time you come on, I feel like my head's spinning or off my shoulders. And it's a great conversation. If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that?

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  I'm on all the, the usual things, Blue Sky. I, I, I did resume. Sadly, posting

• 1:08:29Ryan Broderick?

  I see you on there.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like either either I lost a complete and total step like and I can't post on that platform anymore, which is very like I'm very willing to entertain that I'm washed. But I do also believe that I'm being effectively shadow banned because like it is impossible to get engagement on that platform in in the Elon Musk era unless you're like, you know, hosting AI hype slop or like white nationalist memes. So

• 1:08:57Ryan Broderick?

  And paying for it and paying for it, which I think is ties into the theme of today's episode.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  But I host a podcast called Galaxy Brain that is, I would say, you know, very complimentary in topics to this one. It's not a zero sum game. So

• 1:09:12Ryan Broderick?

  Your newest episode interviewing the CEO of Dropout was great. Unbelievable.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Sam is a genius. And yeah.

• 1:09:23Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass

• 1:10:08Ryan Broderick?

  while you still can.