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Indie Reads the Unlimited Hangout Article About Polymarket (2nd hour) · IndieNewsNow LIVE! Clips

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Who are these people?
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to remind people where we were at on this article where we're talking
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: about Polymarket and the origins of Polymarket.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: The Polymarket was effectively a DARPA program that was a policy analysis market
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: where they tried to predict what would happen,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: and then it evolved into the Hollywood stock market.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: And they initially had cryptocurrency running behind it.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And somewhere along the way in the early 2000s,
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: there was a push to bring fiat currency into this and have it be real money.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: And who was involved with that?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Our own commerce secretary,
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: Howard Lutnick,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: old nut lick himself from Cantor Fitzgerald that had bought the rights
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: to this Hollywood stock exchange product.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Then we also talked about LifeLog,
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: which was a DARPA product, a program that developed into Facebook.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: Funded by Peter Thiel or initially seed funded $500,000 by Peter Thiel
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: and Sean Parker was involved.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: We were talking about the movie The Social Network and kind of
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: the revisionist history around how that all started.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we were actually getting to the spot where Shane Coplin,
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: this person that they tell the story as the one who invented or created the
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Polymarket,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: actually,
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: now we get into who is this guy,
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: where did he come from, and how does he fit into this whole picture?
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so again, this is UnlimitedHangout.com.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is an article by Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin,
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: where they're talking about Polymarket and the origins,
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: which are not the way that it's been sold,
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: which is basically something out of their basement.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to start,
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: it's about halfway down the article with the section that says enter Shane Copland.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Shane Copland,
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: the eventual founder of Polymarket,
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: was raised in New York City, the only child of two South African college professors.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are also both South African.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: He was raised,
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: however,
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: solely by his mother,
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: with Shane later describing his father as a mad scientist
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: who studied panic disorders.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: Growing up middle class,
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Copland developed a major itch at a young age to make money,
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: which reportedly drove his early interest in file sharing websites as well as later
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: the nation cryptocurrency industry.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, Afrikaner.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, Abby.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: As he developed this itch to aggressively pursue wealth,
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Copland simultaneously developed an obsession with the background and early rise
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: of early 2000s tech entrepreneurs who went on to become billionaires,
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: specifically Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: Copland was smart,
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: yet unmotivated,
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: and felt like he didn't stand out enough to compete alongside his peers
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: by conventional means.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: He would later tell New York Magazine, quote,
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think having a background that was so uncredentialed,
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: it was very clear to me that I was a goner if I was going to go
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: the path everyone else was going and just try to compete there.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: Copland ultimately determined that he would have
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: to emulate his role models much more closely if he wanted to follow in their example
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: and reap the rewards.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: This mindset soon pushed a 16-year-old Copland to pursue an internship at what was
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: then one of the city's hottest startups,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: Genius, a lyric and web annotation company initially known as Rap Genius.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Copland had repeatedly attempted to contact Genius' co-founders, who ignored his emails.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: This led him to travel straight to Genius' office,
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: where he successfully pitched himself to the people actually
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: running the company.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: Christopher Glazek,
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: then executive editor of Genius,
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: later wrote that, quote,
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Within minutes of meeting him,
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: I learned that Shane possessed near encyclopedic knowledge
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: of major tech entrepreneurs,
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: and he eagerly volunteered to add annotations to the Wikipedia pages
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: of Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick from Uber.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: During the course of his Genius internship,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: Copland became the site's top expert on the Facebook founder.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: Notably, Genius was a 2011 Y Combinator company.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's seed funding.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: That same year saw Yuri Milner and Ron Conway's SV Angel become intimately involved
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: with the startup incubator.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Milner was an important early investor and an advisor to Facebook.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: Conway's significant connections to the people behind Facebook are discussed later
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: in this article.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: 2011 was also the year that Sam Altman,
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: recognized widely as a Peter Thiel protege, became a partner at Y Combinator.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_01: Altman would later take over the leadership of the incubator in 2014.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: Now you know him as the CEO of OpenAI.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Our founder and Greg Brockman's CEO.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: In 2014,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Shane Copland discovered Ethereum and participated in its ICO
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: or initial coin offering that same year.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: He subsequently developed a financial incentive to support Ethereum's progress.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: A since-deleted biography of Copland states that he moved to San Francisco sometime
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: in 2016 to intern at Chronicled,
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: which he described as one of the first venture-funded Ethereum startups.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: There he says he was immersed amongst a team of blockchain-obsessed tinkerers,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: and it was there where his eyes were opened to the vast possibilities
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: of decentralized applications.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: According to a past press release or past press releases,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: one of Chronicle's goals as a company included, quote,
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: creating a world in which physical and digital experiences are fully synchronized
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: by offering a turnkey solution to securely register any asset identity from art
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: to automobiles to drones to secure shipping containers and pharmaceuticals on
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: the blockchain.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: He was a blockchain douche.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: And here's one of these early bios, now deleted from his time as Token Union's CEO.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's a link to the internet archive for that.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: Again, they're trying to wipe this history out to rewrite the history as
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: to how this company was founded and came to be.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: People like Whitney are really inconvenient to that.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: One of Chronicle's main investors at the time was Pantera Capital,
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: whose co-chief investment officer was Joey Krug.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Around the time that Upland interned at Chronicle, right?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Krug, a Thiel fellow who had co-founded the Ethereum-based prediction market Augur,
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: remember we talked about Augur last week,
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: would subsequently join Thiel's Founders Fund.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: There he would become a crucial early investor in Polymarket.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Krug, Auger, and their significance to this story are explored later in this article.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Armed with glowing and recommendations from his former superiors of both genius
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: and chronicled,
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: Copland was admitted to NYU to study computer science and began attending in 2016.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: However, he quickly became bored and disillusioned.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: He eventually dropped out halfway through his second semester
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: to pursue blockchain
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: projects full-time.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: He smelled the money.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: Shortly after,
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: in 2017,
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Copland subsequently created a company called Token Union,
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: which offered rewards for holding either Ethereum or ERC-20 tokens.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Those are tokens that are on the Ethereum network.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: It initially framed itself as the world's first Ethereum-based savings account.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: Token Union was originally founded as Token Bank, BNK,
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: and one of its former employees,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yash Patel, has claimed that this company was the direct predecessor of Polymarket.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: Not us!
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: This guy!
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: Who worked there?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: Notably,
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: one of the domains used by TokenBank or TokenUnion.io now directs to Union.Market,
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: another Copland domain.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: So it seems like that makes sense.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: The shift in TokenUnion domains over the years from TokenBank.com,
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: TokenUnion.io,
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: to Union.Market,
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: and finally to Poly.Market and PolyMarket.com seems to suggest that Patel was right.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Lending further support to this theory is the fact that all
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: of those domains now redirect to Polymarket.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: And yet they'll deny that that's what's happening.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's unreal.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the Bancorp Protocol.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: Working to integrate the Bancorp Protocol.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Oddly, any discussion of token union is absent from essentially every media profile
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: of Copland that's been written since Polymarket achieved breakout success
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: a few years ago.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: All of these media profiles paint Copland's success as a derivative of pure luck
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: and assure the reader that Polymarket began in 2020 with no real predecessor.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: In one of these recent media profiles,
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: Copland asserted that he had picked the Union.Market because of
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: a New York eatery he enjoyed at the time.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: Complete bullshit.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Though he acknowledges Union.Market was focused on yield-bearing digital assets,
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: neither he nor the article make any mention of his company Token Union.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is despite the relationship documented above between the token union I.O.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: and union.market domains.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: One must wonder why token union has seemingly been ripped out of the narrative,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: not just by the mainstream media stenographers chronicling his
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: and Polymarket's rise, but also by Copland himself.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's like he never even founded the company.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because,
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_01: inconveniently,
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: that company evolving into Polymarket does not really tell the story that they want
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: to tell.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: One of the reasons the token union has seemingly been erased from current narratives
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: about both Copland and Polymarket may lie in the token union's close partnership
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: and integration with Bancor.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Bancor was created by Guy and Galia Bernatzi.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: The nephew and niece of long time and current Israeli Prime Minister,
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: the war criminal himself, Benjamin Netanyahu.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is what drove Nikita Byer so crazy to try to smear this.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Token Union had an integration with Bancor.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: So they were connected to Netanyahu's niece and nephew.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Galia Benartzi,
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: immediately prior to creating Bancor,
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: had been a partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund,
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: where she helped lead the firm's investments in Israel.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing to see here.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: One of the main tokens showcased
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: in Token Union's promotional material is Bancor's BNT token,
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: and Bancor is listed among its small list of official partners.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Bancor with the Bancor.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, Katie.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: So Bancor is listed among its smallest of partners.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Token Union's white paper also touted its integration with Bancor as one
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: of its platform's main advantages.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: And now all of a sudden it's like it never existed.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Bancor advisor Lou Kerner was also a token union advisor alongside Jim Haft,
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: with whom Kerner created Crypto Oracle.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Crypto Oracle was founded in 2017 and at the time its founders advised Copland's token union.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: It focused on supporting early stage blockchain firms.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Bullshit.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: This strongly suggests that Crypto Oracle had backed Copland's company,
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: which later claimed to have raised millions in a private presale
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: from undisclosed sources.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like Bancor, Crypto Oracle is also listed as a token union partner.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Why else would they be listed as a token union partner
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: unless they had been investing millions of dollars into
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: the company?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Kerner has major connections to the Israeli tech startup scene,
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: which even former Mossad directors have noted is stuffed
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: with Israeli intelligence veterans and which,
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: per Israeli policy,
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: is full of Israeli intelligence fronts posing as private companies in order
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: to execute projects that were previously performed in-house by
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: the Israeli intelligence apparatus, like Pegasus.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: Kerner, who boasts close ties to AIPAC,
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: so like the worst of the worst,
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: previously led the Israel Founders Syndicate and is a current advisor of
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: the Israel Blockchain Association.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Kerner has also partnered in an Israeli tech incubator alongside Glilot Capital.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Lelot Capital was created by two Israeli military intelligence veterans
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: who invest specifically in entrepreneurs who emerge from
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: the Elite Unit 8200 Signals Intelligence Unit,
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: often likened to Israel's equivalent of the NSA,
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: like the lady that's running PragerU that we talked about before.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Kerner is also notably a renowned expert on Facebook,
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: also like Shane Copeland,
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: not unlike Copeland himself,
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: and claims to have once been offered a quarter of Facebook shares by an unknown
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: but clearly major Facebook shareholder.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: My guess that would be Teal or what's his name?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: Sean Parker.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: He's since declined to specify the extent of his Facebook holdings.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Kerner has claimed to have unsuccessfully pitched Mark Zuckerberg to sell him
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: a significant stake in Facebook while Zuckerberg was still a student at Harvard.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: This suggests that another very early investor or figure at Facebook,
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: aside from Zuckerberg,
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: meaning Sean Parker,
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Reid Hoffman,
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Thiel, etc., had tipped Kerner off to the social media company very early on.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Since then,
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Kerner has also become an investor in Palantir,
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: the privatized total information awareness that's chaired and was co-founded
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: by Peter Thiel.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Kerner previously worked at Bill Gross' Idea Lab,
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: the first institutional investor in the Thiel-funded company PayPal.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: In addition to Kerner,
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: Crypto Oracle's other co-founder Jim Haft,
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: as well as another Crypto Oracle employee Jim Dix,
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: are also listed as token union advisors.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Dix is also notably listed as a former SEC prosecutor and was previously
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: a vice president at Deutsche Bank.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: You've got banking people.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: You've got people connected to Israel and Peter Thiel.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Notably, Kerner is not the only Bancorp advisor who was an advisor to Copland's token union.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Here's another one.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Steve Nerayoff, considered the legal architect of Ethereum's 2014 ICO.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Was simultaneously an advisor to Bancor and to Token Union.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't see any potential conflict of interest there, do you?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: An archived version of Token Union's website refers to Naryoff as the co-creator of Ethereum.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's right there.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: StormX, by the way, also completely under the mess.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Half these things are just all these,
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: they're grifts, they're Yeah, nothing good coming out of these companies.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Prior to Ethereum's ICO,
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: the Ethereum white paper published by Vitalik Buterin in 2014 made note of
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: an alternative consensus mechanism to proof of work,
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: which had been popularized by Bitcoin and Ethereum 1.0.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: This alternative consensus mechanism was called proof of stake or POS, like piece of shit.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: Proof of Stake removes the mining of digital assets via large amounts of compute
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: of specific hashing algorithms and instead creates a randomized lottery system
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: that selects validators based on the weight of shares held in the system.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: In this case, how much ETH one holds in a staking contract.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of proof of work rewarding a Bitcoin miner with transaction fees for finding
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: the next block of transactions based purely on how many hashes they can compute,
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_01: proof of stake rewards ETH validators with transaction fees in the form of more ETH,
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: the amount of which is based on how many ETH you already own.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's getting interest on what you already have.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: While the mechanics are novel in their own right,
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: the reality of such a system is that large capital allocators within
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: the ETH system have a larger stake on consensus simply for holding the assets,
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: in addition to generating the yield on their stash of tokens simply
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: for holding them.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: So the ones with the most make the most and set the market.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: How is that decentralized at all?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: Prior to the fall of 2022,
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: transitioned to proof-of-stake,
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: termed The Merge,
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: the Ethereum Foundation worked closely with Stealth startup
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: and Palantir subcontractor Antithesis to test the new consensus mechanism.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: In addition,
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: one of the main forces behind the Ethereum blockchain's move
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: to this POS was Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin,
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: He's not a Nazi,
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: allegedly, who had been promoting proof of stake since at least 2017.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Buterin is also a Teal Fellow who was closely connected to the founding
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: and development of the Ethereum-based prediction platform market Augur,
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: which was co-founded by another Teal Fellow, Joey Krogh.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: So again, very incestuous.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: They're poking in different areas and different markets,
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: similar models, slightly different companies, different people, different models.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: But in the end, they win out because one of them is going to win.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: Long before Ethereum allowed token holders to earn yield
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: on their ETH stacks via POS,
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: projects like Bancor and Copland's token union allowed token holders to earn ETH
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: for simply holding their tokens, again, staking, such as the Augur token, or EP.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Augur's REP and Bancor's BNT were both advertised on token union's website,
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: again, from the archives, offering tokens.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're getting actual ETH for holding either ETH or ERC-20 tokens,
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: which are tokens that were housed on the Ethereum network.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're holding them in a wallet,
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: they'll provide you with more ETH just for letting it sit there so
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: that they can claim as a stake and a proof of stake that there's actual money,
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_01: somebody's money is actually sitting there.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: In addition,
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: as the CEO of Token Union,
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: Copland attended and was a featured speaker at a high-profile blockchain
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: and crypto-related conferences alongside executives at major firms like Meta,
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Microsoft, R3, Visa, Pantera Capital, and so on.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is that ecosystem, the conference ecosystem, that serves to push a narrative.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: At the World Blockchain Forum Conference in November 2018,
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Copland's speech was titled, The Napsterization of Finance.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Gross.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: Sometime between 2018 and 2019,
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: Copland contacted Augur's co-founder,
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Joey Krug, both to complain about Augur's interface and to pitch him on investments.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Krug made up a random target volume of $5 million a week
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: and told Copland he'd invest if he reached it
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: with his proposed prediction market venture.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Around this same time in 2019,
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Copland also reached out to none other than Robin Hansen,
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: the system architect of DARPA's PAM.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, we talked about him last week.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Copland that year claims to have first stumbled upon a Hansen paper entitled,
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Shall We Vote on Values But Bet on Beliefs?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: That Hansen paper being the most inspirational to Copland is notable as it's
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: the paper where Hansen proposes a system of governance based
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: on prediction markets called the futarchy.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: After reading this paper,
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: per New York Magazine,
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Copland proclaimed to Hansen in a verbose email with multiple block paragraphs
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: that he wanted to be the person to bring prediction markets to life.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: It couldn't have been anybody that was connected to this guy
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: that had prior knowledge of these prediction markets,
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: of these policy analysis markets in DARPA and in the Total Information Office.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: Nah, couldn't have.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: Just happened to find it, right?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Just happened to show up on his desk, right?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Hansen was also advising Augur at the time.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: He's said to have largely brushed off Copland.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Naturally.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: Naturally.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Copland went on to officially create Polymarket in June 2020,
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: reportedly due to the COVID crisis forcing him to alter course
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: for his previous project,
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Union Market,
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: and Copland having recently been inspired by the work of both Hansen
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: and Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: As the story goes, Copland then went on by himself and built Polymarket alone in his bathroom.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Sure he did.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: However,
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: that is the official narrative we've been told of Copland and his early interactions
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: with figures like Krogan Hansen.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: As demonstrated thus far in this article,
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: another key part of this official narrative around Copland and Polymarket is a lie.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: Copland didn't come out of nowhere with Polymarket in 2020
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_01: with no real prior footprint or industry connections.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Toplin, well before 2020,
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: was speaking at high-profile conferences alongside top executives at some of
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: the biggest companies in the industry while also attracting,
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: per token union's own claims,
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: millions in private funding and advisors and partners with clear and obvious ties
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: to both private and public sector of Israel and significant ties to top people in
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: the early Ethereum network.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: In order to paint Copland's success with Polymarket as an anomaly and manufacture
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: the appearance of luck, Token Union has been written out of the narrative.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: Given this effort to obfuscate Polymarket's apparent predecessor company,
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: of which Copland was CEO,
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: one can't help but wonder what else has been intentionally left out of the story.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's take a look.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Copland courting the Tealverse,
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: and again,
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: dissent has done extensive work on examining the Tealverse,
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: as has Whitney Webb at Unlimited Hangout,
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: which is what we're reading,
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: by the way,
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin Unlimited Hangout about Polymarket and its origins.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: Copland's aforementioned years-long obsession with the trajectory
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: of Silicon Valley billionaires,
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: particularly Zuckerberg, is worth dwelling on in detail.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: During the time that Copland was a top expert on Zuckerberg,
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: and prior to officially founding Polymarket,
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: several reports had been circulating about the parallels between DARPA's LifeLog
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: and Facebook,
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: including the unusual coincidence that Facebook launched the very same day
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: that LifeLog was formally shuttered.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's not clear if Copland knew of such claims or not,
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: but his apparent obsession with Zuckerberg's and Facebook's rise,
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: as well as his professed desire to imitate that trajectory,
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: suggests that he may have been aware of such claims and how they may have factored
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: into Zuckerberg's professional success.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Again, he also probably knew that Teal was the initial seed funder of Facebook,
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: so he probably would have gone to Teal.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Though in the event that he wasn't,
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Copland surely was aware of the crucial role played by Sean Parker
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: and his associate Peter Thiel in Facebook's early success and the company's ability
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: to become the dominant social media company.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: If Copland was to emulate his hero, he surely would need to find his own Sean Parker.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: However,
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: evidence suggests that Copland not only sought to emulate Zuckerberg
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: during Polymarket's formative period, but also Parker as well.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: As noted earlier,
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: prior to founding Polymarket,
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: Copland had given a speech at the World Blockchain Forum in 2018 called
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: the Napsterization of Finance while serving as CEO of Token Union.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: Remember what Napster, who founded Napster?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: Shortly after formally creating Polymarket in 2020,
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: Koppel would claim that Polymarket was at the vanguard of ushering in
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: the Napsterization of finance.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: In order to Napsterize finance and hold that as a central goal
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: to your business strategy,
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: one must know a considerable amount about the company Napster and what it would mean
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: to Napsterize an industry.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: Given that Sean Parker infamously founded Napster after the CIA made attempts
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: to recruit him as a teen,
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: Copland surely saw both Napster and Parker as models to follow,
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: especially given that Parker was also the first president of Facebook and,
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: crucially,
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: brought Facebook its first big-name investors,
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: like Teal,
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: thus making him critical to the success of Copland's admitted idol, Zuckerberg.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: Disgusting to idolize somebody like Mark Zuckerberg.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: And here's their link between worlds, Sean Parker.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Remember,
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: in the Social Network movie about this that Aaron Sorkin directed and produced,
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: Sean Parker was played by Justin Timberlake.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, it was actually one of his best roles that he's ever played.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: He was brilliant.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: He actually made Sean Parker likable.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: John Parker,
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: let's do a little deep dive,
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: was born in 1979, Fairfax County, Virginia, to an advertiser and an oceanographer.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: While plenty has been written about Parker's,
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: surprisingly few writers have explored the interesting and relevant background
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: of his father.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: They always look at the parents.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Bruce Parker Jr., not Ray, but Bruce Parker Jr. Ray Parker Jr. did the
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: Ghostbusters song.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: John's father spent years working for various government oceanic institutes across
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: the United States,
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: including stints as the chief scientist in NOAA,
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: a director of the Coast Survey Development Lab,
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: and a former director of the World Data Center for Oceanography, among others.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: You should ask Reef about that.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_01: His mom is also in ocean science.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: During his time at the NOAA,
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: From 74 through October of 2004,
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: it's 30 years,
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: his department worked closely with CIA in a data-sharing effort spearheaded
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: by Vice President Gore, known as Project Medea.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Parker's then boss at NOAA, D. James Baker, was a critical part of Project Medea's team.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: Years later,
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: in 2009,
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: Parker Jr. became an active member of the Edge Foundation, founded by John Brockman.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, Greg Brockman is the OpenAI CEO and largely financed by one Jeffrey Epstein.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Womp womp.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: He even penned an introduction for an Edge special event.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: In 2011, titled,
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: When We Cannot Predict,
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: in which the first sentence claims that prediction is the very essence of science.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Prior to his time at NOAA,
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Ben Parker Jr. worked directly with the U.S. Navy, including a summer at the U.S.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory,
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: and two years supplying the DOD with data as an oceanographer at the U.S.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Naval Oceanographic Office.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: Easy for me to say.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_01: Notably,
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: the NOAA and the Navy have long partnered frequently on joint ventures,
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: whereby NOAA technology and data are used for both military and civilian objectives,
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: like dual use.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: Sean's grandfather,
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: water skiing pioneer Bruce Parker Sr.,
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: had his own history with the Navy, helping them train porpoises in the Caribbean.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: The water ski schools owned and operated by Parker Sr.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: were partnered with Harry Conover,
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: whose modeling agency was seeded by former U.S.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: President Gerald Ford and whose wife at the time,
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: Candy Jones,
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: later became the earliest MKUltra whistleblower years before
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: the church committee exposed the CIA project's existence.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: So his grandfather had links to MKUltra.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: Did not know that.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: While his father's lengthy career at NOAA and the Navy likely saw him brush up
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: against the intelligence community and intelligence assets at times,
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: Sean Parker's own trajectory would see him interact much more closely
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: with these groups.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: According to a 2011 Forbes profile on Sean Parker,
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: the FBI raided the 15-year-old then-hacker for illegally hacking
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: into websites associated with government services and a Fortune 500 company.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: He was ultimately let off with community service.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: During his community service sentence,
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Parker described meeting a punk rock princess with whom he lost his virginity as
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: an incredible cosmic irony.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: Parker furthered it was the most romantic experience of my life and
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: that he met her only because I'd been raided by the FBI.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: As the story goes,
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: shortly thereafter,
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: Parker was then recruited by the CIA himself after his success at
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: a local computer science fair.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Parker has claimed that when presented with the CIA's offer,
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: he instead chose to work at Mark Pincus' startup, Freeloader.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: He could have done both.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: He later joined the DC-based internet service provider UUNet.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's a company that claims to have been the first commercial ISP
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: that employed many former members of DARPA who had built an early iteration of
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: the internet known as ARPANET.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: Parker's former boss, Mark Pincus, later founded the juggernaut Facebook game company Zynga.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody knows them from Words with Friends.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: Which at one point accounted for around 10% of the social media giant's income.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: They ran that into the ground.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: Facebook gaming is a butchered mess.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Pincus would also come to work with and invest alongside Parker.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: Including in Polymarket after making critical early investments
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: in several earlier Parker-linked companies such as Napster and Facebook.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there's Parker and Pincus.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: Parker's on the left with the beard.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: You see how they made Sean, what's his name?
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: Justin Timberlake look like him.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: Around the same time Parker began programming at UUNet,
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: Microsoft acquired a 13% stake in the company.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: And in an August 2011 email to Jess Staley,
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: Jeffrey Epstein implied that Parker,
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: using his teams at Facebook and Spotify,
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: were affiliated with Gates and his entourage.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_01: While Parker should have been in high school,
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: he instead earned $80,000 his senior year and wasn't going to school.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: According to Parker,
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: quote, I was technically in a co-op program, but in truth was just going to work.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was during this period that Parker met fellow teenager Sean Fanning online
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: and alongside a couple friends founded
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: the quick-to-fail internet security firm Crosswalk.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_01: While not much is available about the firm online today,
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: seemingly the concept was that two hackers,
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: Sean and Sean,
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_01: would share their expertise on breaking into online systems with companies looking
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: to strengthen their cybersecurity.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: After his senior year and with his co-op program earnings in hand,
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: Parker put off pursuing college to fly out to San Francisco and co-found
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_01: the pioneering music-sharing site Napster with Fanning.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Parker referred to his time at Napster as Napster University,
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_01: explaining that it was a crash course in intellectual property law,
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: corporate finance, entrepreneurship, and law school.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Parker furthered that some of the emails I wrote when I was just a kid
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: who didn't know what he was doing are apparently in law school textbooks.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: Despite Napster eventually succumbing to a deluge of high profile litigation,
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: Parker's model for disregarding bureaucracy and legislation in the pursuit
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: of technological disruption was established by the young founder's indifference to
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: the legal context surrounding his company's services.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_01: And what he's basically saying is that he put the record industry out of business
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: with his service, with Napster, which he made available for free to everyone.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then they sued him into oblivion for violating copyright.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now we get to Ron Conway, an early investor in PayPal and Google.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Among other stalwarts,
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: met Parker and Fanning,
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: the Shons,
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: at the onset of Napster and has backed practically every Parker project since.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's done nothing but make him money.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: Fanning later referred to Conway as like family to me,
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: explaining that he is such a big part of who I am today.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he bankrolls you.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: However,
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: not every Parker Beck venture was a success,
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: such as the failed startup Plaxo,
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_01: which sought to auto-update a person's email-based address book and was later called
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: a precursor to social networking.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: Parker was infamously forced out of that company in 2004.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: I remember Plexo.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_01: So what they basically did was they got everyone
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: to update their contact information,
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: and then they had you sync your address book and then told you, hey,
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: we saw in somebody else's contacts that this person's phone number has been updated.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: Is this the right one or is that one?
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then they built like a master database.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: That was the precursor to Facebook.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Shortly after being kicked out of Plexo,
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: Parker saw a simply designed website,
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: thefacebook.com,
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: on the computer owned by his roommate's girlfriend, who was then attending Stanford.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's not how it was presented in the social network.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was a girl that he had hooked up with for the night,
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: who was actually like the dean's daughter or something, who was...
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: In a French minor.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_01: Parker immediately emailed its creator Mark Zuckerberg,
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: much like what he had done with Fanning, and offered to help with his website.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: And again,
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_01: there's a famous scene of Justin Timberlake discovering what's the Facebook and
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: the girl saying it's addicting.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he goes, I need to find you, Mark Zuckerberg.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: Really good movie.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_01: Matt Kohler, who joined Facebook shortly after Parker, noted the similarity himself.
• 38:28
  SPEAKER_01: Quote,
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: Napster and Facebook are two of the most significant companies in the history of
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: the Internet,
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_01: and in both cases,
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Parker spotted them earlier than anyone, other than the people who invented them.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: By June 2004,
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Parker had moved into the infamous Facebook Villa and became an essential player in
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: the construction of the juggernaut Facebook.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now Meta is today.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: Again,
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: the social network will go into a lot of this with flowery revisionist history
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: that makes Zuckerberg and Parker look like heroes and Eduardo Saverin look like
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: a dumbass who had his company stolen out from under him.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: But still ended up getting a ton of money in a buyout.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: While Conway decided to initially pass on investing due to concerns with Parker's
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: then failing Plaxo's contact book application,
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: the second person they called,
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: early PayPal employee and Pincus' longtime friend Reed Hoffman,
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: we know him,
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: was too busy founding LinkedIn and instead connected the duo with his former boss,
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Thiel.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Thiel quickly invested and joined the board.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: Joining Thiel and Hoffman was Hoffman's close friend and Parker's former boss, Mark Pincus.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Again, all these names coming around again and again and again.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: Forbes later referred to Parker as an early Facebook business veteran.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: Who helped the college-aged Facebook founders network around Silicon Valley,
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: set up routers and benevolent investors like Kiel, Hoffman, and Pincus.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: Forbes also quotes Zuckerberg as stating that Sean was pivotal
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: in helping Facebook transform from a college project into a real company.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: Suggesting that without Sean Parker,
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: Facebook's enormous success may not have materialized at all.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: And if he hadn't connected it to Peter Thiel, he might be right.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: Parker, Zuckerberg,
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: and Thiel went on to change the internet and pave the way for further exploration of
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: the concepts of digital identity,
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: digital content distribution, digital community, and even digital currency.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: All essential pillars of the now blossoming prediction market industry.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: In 2005,
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: Parker was accused of possessing cocaine during a house party at a rental
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: under his name,
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: and although he was never charged,
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: he was essentially forced off of the Facebook board.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: Despite this,
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: Teal has claimed that he does not think Sean ever really left Facebook
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: and has continued to be involved in many ways.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: Again, that whole cocaine incident was also documented in the Social Network movie.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_01: The next year,
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: in 2006, Parker was hired by Thiel and became a partner at Thiel's Founders Fund.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: There,
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: he famously courted and advised the team behind Spotify to legally commercialize
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_01: the digital music industry,
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: succeeding exactly where Napster had quote-unquote failed.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: Thiel reiterated his admiration for Parker,
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: referring to him as a brilliant entrepreneur who's somehow transforming
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: the United States and is not yet understood by society.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: Again,
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Parker.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, Howery, right, Ken Howery from Founders Fund.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: Not long after,
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: Parker had stated that it's technology,
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: not business or government,
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: that's the real driving force behind large-scale societal shifts.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, technology funded by the government, dummy.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: This idea is similar to those expressed by Parker's boss, Thiel,
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: who has described technology as a way to exert unilateral change on the world.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: That's frightening, and it's therefore an incredible alternative to politics.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: Given that Teal views technology as the most effective way
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: to exert unilateral change on a society and as a way to bypass public consent,
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: his view that Parker and his companies have been key to transforming
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: the United States takes on increased significance.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: One should also consider the early role of Parker and Teal
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_01: at Facebook alongside their respective connections to
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_01: the American national security state.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: Parker had early run-ins with the FBI and was sought out by the CIA.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: As detailed earlier in this piece,
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: Thiel was also actively working to privatize at least some programs
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: of DARPA's Information Awareness Office at the time Parker contacted him about
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: the Facebook.com.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: Having just privatized DARPA's TIA program into Palantir,
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: Teal and perhaps Parker certainly saw in Facebook a company that could be molded
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: to serve as more than just a social network.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: Teal likely saw its utility as an analog for the shuttered sister project
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_01: of TIA LifeLog,
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: particularly given the fact that Teal was known to have been meeting
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: with John Poindexter,
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: the close friend of LifeLog's project manager Doug Gage, during this time.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_01: Teal's fondness for Parker and his belief that Parker has played a major role
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: in transforming the United States may lie in Parker's outsized role
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: in developing what we could call the Napsterization model for a given industry
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: that many Teal-linked ventures have since followed.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: Parker's Napster,
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: even though it failed,
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: was able to test the regulatory environment and determine what was needed for
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: a successor to emerge as the dominant de facto monopoly in that industry with
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: the blessing of regulators.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: In the case of Napster's successor Spotify,
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: it was Parker,
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: then at Thiel's Founders Fund,
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: who spotted a worthy vessel for his ultimate ambition that began with Napster.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: Subsequently,
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: this Napsterization model has been applied in several Tealink companies,
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: including Facebook itself,
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_01: via its attempts to launch its Liebrook stablecoin,
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: as detailed previously by Unlimited Hangout.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: For example,
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: Facebook itself faced many legal battles during its formative years
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: and thus employed many heavy hitters with ties to the public sector
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: as legal counsel,
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: including former State Department official Jennifer Newstead,
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: who previously helped draft the Patriot Act.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: Another former Facebook lawyer,
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: Ted Uliot, had worked in George W. Bush's White House before Facebook.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uliad himself was suggested to Zuckerberg by Paul Cappuccio,
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_01: a lawyer who had successfully represented AOL
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: in its landmark litigation regarding EU approval.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's an outcome that helped globally enshrine American-made interests during
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: the Internet's proliferation.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: Both Cappuccio and Yuliat worked at Kirkland and Ellis,
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: the law firm hired to defend Jeffrey Epstein,
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: while Cappuccio helped Parker and Teal deregulate and disrupt
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: the electronic cigarette market as the general counsel for the now bankrupt NJOY,
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: the first evade company to receive FDA approval.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: You see all these guys are behind all the most evil shit that's now dismantling our society.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: Reshaping America into the horror system that it is today.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: This Napsterization model is evident in Copland's comments about token union,
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: which he once referred to as an economic experiment that could ultimately prove
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: to be an integral part and one of the leading methods of storing value in
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: the token ecosystem of tomorrow.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: Tokens are shitcoins.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: It is certainly interesting that Copland would be able to attract millions
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: of dollars in seed funding from figures such as Lou Kerner
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: and become deeply partnered with Bancor for something that was seen as
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: an economic experiment and not a viable for-profit company.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: That is,
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: unless the goal of both Copland and his backers
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: at Token Union was economic experimentation with the goal
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: of napsterizing major aspects of this industry.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: With a focus on the Ethereum ecosystem.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: Meaning that they wanted to Napsterize banking.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_01: Notably,
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: in a recent media profile,
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: Copland was asked if he viewed Polymarket as a technological descendant of Napster.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: To which Copland said, there are parallels.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: While Copland was building the Ethereum-focused token union,
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: the Ethereum-based prediction market platform Augur was taking off.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: Advised by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and Robin Hansen,
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: who had founded the policy analysis market under DARPA and financed in part by
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: a Teal Fellowship,
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: Augur eventually failed to succeed in creating
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: a globally successful prediction market.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: Developed and maintained by the Forecast Foundation nonprofit,
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: Augur had hinted before it became largely relevant and Krug left the foundation
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: that it would offer a widely anticipated for-profit spinoff.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's weird.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: Shortly after Krug stopped working on Augur, he joined Sean Parker at Thiel's Founders Fund.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: So everybody works for Peter Thiel.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we're learning.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: In keeping with the Napsterization model,
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: Progg and Founders Fund,
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: with lessons learned from Augur,
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: would become early investors and advisors to the for-profit polymarket.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: How convenient that they don't get it right as a not-for-profit,
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: but once it's for-profit, they sure as shit get it right.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: Teal isn't human.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: Fight me.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not fighting you.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think, hey, look, he's an anagram for the reptile.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: Peter Teal is an anagram.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you rearrange the letter, it literally spells out the reptile.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: In keeping with that Napsterization model,
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: Prog and Founders Fund,
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: with lessons learned from Augur,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: would become early investors and advisors in Polymarket for Profit.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: Krug has since commented on the symmetry between the evolution of Napster
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: into Spotify via Sean Parker at Founders Fund and the evolution of Augur
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_01: into Polymarket via Krug's role at Founders Fund.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: Every time it's Peter Thiel.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: So who's Joey Krug, Augur, Ethereum, and Market Force Divination?
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: Joey Krug's young, born in 1995.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: He began mining Bitcoin in his bedroom in May 2011, around 2015.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: By late 2013,
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: he was inspired by a recent price surge to pursue cryptocurrency more seriously
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: and began a Bitcoin club at his university,
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: eventually founding a Bitcoin point-of-sale company.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: In 2014,
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: he teamed up with his college friend Jeremy Gardner and
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_01: a computer scientist named Jack Peterson to put together
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_01: a decentralized prediction market called Augur.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_01: Augur was inspired and derived from a Bitcoin-based project called Truthcoin.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: The first version of the white paper for Truthcoin was first published
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: in December 2013 by Paul Stork.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_00: What happened?
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly,
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_01: only three years before the renewed interest
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_01: in cryptocurrency-based prediction markets,
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: DARPA's sister agency,
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, IARPA,
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: which is responsible for paying for experimental projects for the U.S.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: intelligence community,
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: announced that they were launching a four-year,
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: $50 million program that would pay people willing to predict major world events.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: This program known as Aggregative Contingents Estimation or ACE was headed by Jason Matheny.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: After running ACE and later IARPA as a whole,
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: Matheny launched the Center for Security and Emerging Technology,
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_01: or CSET,
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: with a $55 million grant from the Open Philanthropy Project,
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: co-founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, again, partner of Peter Thiel.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: The ACE program officially ended in June 2015,
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: shortly after Krug formalized the not-for-profit entity tied to Augur's development,
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: the Forecast Foundation.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_01: So again, they learn as not-for-profits.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: Then once they have the model worked out,
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: they shut down the not-for-profit,
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: run it into the ground, and open it up as a for-profit entity.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: Take the bones and the concepts.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: Soon after the launch of the Ethereum network in 2014,
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin approached Krug.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: Buterin had recently received a Teal Fellowship to further the development of Ethereum.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: Buterin convinced Krug to develop what would become the prediction market auger,
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: not on Bitcoin as originally planned, but on Ethereum.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Buterin argued that doing so would allow Krug to take advantage of
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: a more expressive smart contract programming language than what was available
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: on Bitcoin.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't understand the difference between that shit.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: I do know that the gas fees now on Ethereum are out of sight and
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: a lot more expensive to transact than to transact Bitcoin.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that is because of the success of Bitcoin.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_01: That of Ethereum and the growth into thousands of dollars a coin.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: So this is him presenting a single slideshow integrating Augur's logo alongside
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: the logos of DARPA's failed PAM initiative and InTrade,
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: which once collaborated on PAM.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: So Krug and his team,
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: now counting Buterin as an advisor,
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: then founded the Forkast Foundation in Estonia in December of 2014.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: Huh, something else happened in 2014, the Maidan coup.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting that this is all going on in Ukraine,
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: right around the time that Pierre Omidyar is funding the Maidan coup.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: Tio worked for Omidyar at eBay and PayPal.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see how this is all linked and connected?
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: Another advisor,
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_01: Ron Bernstein,
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: was the co-founder of Intrade,
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: which we mentioned earlier,
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: previously had partnered with DARPA to provide data for their PAM experiments.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: Bernstein's Tradesports.com,
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: which had acquired Intrade in 2003,
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: had leased the tech to the Forecast Foundation behind Augur in exchange
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: for REP tokens, Bitcoin, created during their groundbreaking fundraiser.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_01: Leading Tradesports.com to amass a large ETH stake
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: after it converted its RepToken holdings into ETH.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly,
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: during this same time,
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_01: Augur co-founder Jeremy Gardner posted in 2015 that some on
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: the Augur team were speaking to a few several-letter agencies
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_01: to help them understand the technology we're building.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Gardner went so far as to say that the DOD, DARPA,
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: and CIA are huge fans of Augur and that the prediction market platform had sought
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: the bill.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_01: Upon leaving Augur in a messy lawsuit,
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: Gardner joined Blockchain Capital,
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: an influential cryptocurrency venture firm founded
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: by Tether co-founder Brock Pierce,
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: who also has child molestation ties,
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_01: links to Peter Thiel and other Bitcoin douches like Steve Bannon, right?
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: Also features prominently in the Chain series, right?
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a series at Unlimited Hangout talking about the origins of blockchain.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_01: Notably,
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: the Augur team soon added the architect of DARPA's failed PAM prediction market,
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: Robin Hanson, as an advisor.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: The Augur logo notably bears significant similarities to the logos
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: of DARPA's failed TIA and PAM projects, i.e.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: a one-eyed pyramid.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: In fact,
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: a profile on Auger from 2018 notes that Krug,
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_01: one of his co-founders,
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: and two unnamed Auger advisors,
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: one of which was likely Hansen,
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: had explicitly decided to make Auger's logo a pyramid with three points converging
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: upon an all-seeing eye.
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: This, among other similarities,
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: suggests that Auger was an effort to resurrect Pam,
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: particularly given that a few short years later,
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: That in a few short years,
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: Teal's tentacles would extend deeply into Augur
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: and were already present indirectly via Buterin's Teal Fellowship.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: And again, there's your all-seeing eye of the world and a chart from the triangle.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: There's the total information awareness again,
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: eye from the triangle looking at the world,
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: and here's Augur and eye inside a triangle.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: Also spelling out the letter A, which is interesting.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: In the fall of 2015,
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: the Forecast Foundation and Augur operated the first ever ICO on
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_01: the Ethereum blockchain with their token REP.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: Reports from October, oh, it was also probably the first rug pull, by the way.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: Reports from October 2015 during its ICO claim
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: that Augur was courting four major banks in addition to a partnership
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_01: with IBM Watson in efforts to develop a closed-source alternative to Augur.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: This fundraising method,
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: analogous to the initial public offering,
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: Came to dominate the remainder of the decade in the crypto space,
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: leading to its pioneer Krug to eventually join two of
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: the most influential investing firms in the industry,
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: Pantera Capital and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: In June 2016, Krug himself was awarded a Thiel Fellowship to further develop Augur.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_01: The next year,
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: he joined Dan Moorhead's Pantera Capital as a co-chief investor officer or a CIO
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: in 2017.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: That year in June 2017,
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: in a post published on his Medium account announcing his Pantera appointment,
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: Krug specifically noted that this would help solve a dire need for liquidity
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: on Augur, even stating that Pantera would be actively trading on it.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_01: Quote, once Augur's out,
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: we can even trade on it, which will increase liquidity and be good for everyone.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: There are no set allocations for anything in the fund.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's all about capacity and what we can spend the money on that is
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_01: the best investment or most profitable.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: If a million people show up day one of Augur's full release,
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_01: then there's probably no need or edge for us to trade.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: But if it does not happen, we will trade as long as we have an edge.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: This is an altruism.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_01: We're not planning to lose money to attract users to Augur.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: However,
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_01: since we have an edge,
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: even in markets like Bitcoin,
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: we will almost certainly have an edge on Augur markets for quite a while.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because nobody even knows what the fuck Augur is yet.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_01: In July 2018,
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_01: Augur released its primordial iteration of Based on
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: the native Ethereum network token ETH and its REP token that had been created
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_01: during its groundbreaking ICO.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: According to Krug,
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: version 1 of Augur was a, quote,
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: very slow,
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: expensive,
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: difficult-to-use version,
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: unquote, and left users exposed to varying price fluctuations of tokens.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: As the Augur blog noted in 2021,
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: version one was really the first real-world deployment of a free
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: and open prediction market, which, quote,
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: allowed the community to test many hypotheses and ideas that had been written about
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: for decades prior by many academics,
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: software engineers, and free market information enthusiasts.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, it was an economic experiment.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: Version 2 of Augur,
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: launched in 2020,
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: replaced the unit of account with a stablecoin,
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: specifically using DAI, an algorithmic stablecoin managed by MakerDAO.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: You should recognize MakerDAO because they actually,
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_01: I believe, created the AssangeDAO, which nobody knows what happened to that.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_01: Despite version 2 solving a lot of issues from version 1,
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: it became clear that Augur was too resource-intensive to live fully
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: on Ethereum mainnet.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: Due to this,
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: and because of the evolution of externally traded Augur shares
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: on existing automated markets,
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_01: the Forecast Foundation was ultimately led to launch Augur Turbo in 2021.
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: This gets really wonky.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: Augur Turbo partnered with Oracle provider Chainlink and Ethereum Layer 2,
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: Polygon,
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: both infrastructure partners that Polygon would utilize only a few years later.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea what that sentence means.
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_01: I don't understand this shit for the most.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: Once you get really into the weeds, and that's what this is.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: These decisions to move towards L2s and stablecoins were anything but trivial.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: Layer 2.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know the difference between Layer 2 and Layer 1.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: In fact,
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: Krug himself has expressed that without crypto,
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: prediction markets would be unable to function.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: Really important line right there.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: According to Krug,
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: two of the main pillars of prediction market industry at large,
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: a 24-7 global internet-based market
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_01: and practically irreversible transactions help Unlock prediction market's ability
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: to function and succeed.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: In a traditional online betting market with legacy financial rails such
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: as credit cards,
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: there are few legal protections for bookmakers who successfully fend off scams in
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_01: the event of a market loser claiming that their losing bet was made fraudulently.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_01: The credit card company ultimately becomes the oracle of the payout,
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: meaning that it solely holds the decision to settle the funding transaction even
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_01: after the event the bet is predicated on has passed.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: Cryptocurrency also helps market makers circumnavigate laws,
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_01: such as the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act,
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: which prohibits gambling businesses from knowingly accepting payments in connection
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: with the participation of another person in a bet or wager that involves the use of
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: the internet.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is why you have no online casinos or had no online casinos for a long time in
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: the U.S., You're now seeing a lot of that stuff drop.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_01: You're now seeing Bet365 and a lot of these casino apps in states
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: where betting has been legalized.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: In Atlantic City and Pennsylvania and those kind of things, you're now seeing online bets.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: One of the Hill things, I can't think of it now.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: They also have a betting market.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: For example,
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: the user could bet $100 that the U.S.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_01: would win the World Cup,
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_01: and even after the team's eliminated and the terms of the bet are closed,
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_01: said user could phone their credit card company,
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_01: claim the bet was made fraudulently, and ask for the funds to be returned.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: In contrast,
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: when a bet such as this is made using stablecoins in the form of a smart contract,
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_01: even prior to the completion of the terms of the bet,
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_01: the payouts are already funded and set to be distributed.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_01: Unfortunately,
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_01: the use of crypto alone does not completely remove the need for trust in such
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_01: a scenario,
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_01: with a smart contract innately requiring an oracle to feed
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_01: the correct market outcome data, which then triggers the payouts.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: This issue,
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: known colloquially as the oracle problem,
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_01: and how it relates to Polymarket's legal standing and centralization,
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_01: is to be discussed in greater detail in Part 2 of this investigation.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: Let me see how much more we have.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: There's quite a bit.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: All right, I'm going to stop for tonight.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: Whitney, chill, chill, lady.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: Seriously, like this is insane, this length.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_01: And again,
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_01: I've been reading this now for over two hours,
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm still not even close to being done with it.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: There's probably still another hour to go.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to have to wait until next week for the rest of this.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: I'm spent and I've got more to get through, believe it or not.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's stop right there.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_01: OK, betting on the World Cup.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that a credit card company could refund the user by saying,
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_01: hey, my kid bet this and it was a mistake.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then the company that funded the bet that took the bet would be out the money
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: because they already had to pay out the person that honored the bet on
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_01: the other side.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, fuck Peter Thiel.
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: All these people, Shane Coplin and Zuckerberg.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: But Zuckerberg's not really involved in this.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_01: But you've got Howard Lutnick involved in this.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_01: And you've got these other benefactors, Joey Krug.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: And Sean Parker and all of these people.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very, very small, incestuous network of billionaire bros.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_01: Billionaire tech bros that have been shaping what we've been seeing,
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_01: hearing, dealing with, and a lot of our reality.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we're going to continue this next week for sure.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, support independent media because we need it more than ever.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I don't know too many...
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_01: Outlets and too many shows that are reading these articles in full so
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_01: that you can decide for yourself and hear how it all plays out.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 1:06:55
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• 1:06:59
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• 1:07:01
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• 1:07:05
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• 1:07:11
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• 1:07:13
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• 1:07:17
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• 1:07:22
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• 1:07:25
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• 1:07:29
  SPEAKER_01: I truly believe that.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I will see you next Tuesday night.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: We'll be back here for Indie News Now Live.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_01: I love you all.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: Have a great night, everyone.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_00: No!
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: We just fucking lost the stream!
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: I guess this isn't such an awful place It's not what you want me
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: to say You prove it's possible to sleep for days
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I still think you're right here awake The cost of living isn't much to make
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_00: But God,
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_00: it's so hard to say And when they told you everything, I said,
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: were you safe?
• 1:08:17
  Were you safe?